Driscoll challenges reassessment

[Copanut]

Originally Posted by squarian

No doubt you're right, and the necessary data must be available.

How I look at it is that, if Rankin's prop values really have increased 60% since 2005, I wish I'd bought some property in Rankin.

Sure, a property costing 8000 in 2005 is now worth 12,800.

[WhoIsStanwix?]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

The report does in fact get into that, and that is where it becomes clear that lower-value properties are systematically being assessed more than higher-value properties relative to recent sales. This in turn does have aggregate effects from poorer to richer school districts, or richer to poorer neighborhoods, and so on, but that is really a byproduct of this consistent underlying bias in the assessments.

Got it. So what this report/filing is saying is more like the extremes of the property value spectrum are smoothed out to look more like the median property value. To this extent, towns with an outsized number of low value properties are systematically overassessed relative to the higher average value towns as a whole. This happens at the individual property level, where the lowest of the low value properties are artifically inflated, and the highest of the high value properties are artificially deflated, possibly by some smoothing mechanism?

Edit: I'd like to point out that I'm not necessarily agreeing that this is true and accurate, but rather, I'm trying to summarize my understanding of the argument being made.

[BrianTH]

I'd have to go back to the report (it is Exhibit 1 in the link above), but I don't think it really explained why this regressivity (as it is known) actually happened. It just showed it had happened and proposed a formulaic correction.

[PreservationPioneer]

I am constantly looking at properties in low-income neighborhoods and comparing their current sales prices to their newly assessed values. What I can tell you is that the new assessment has property value increases across the board in low-income neighborhoods, to the extent that many properties are significantly over-valued.