In some states you have to wait for the tax assessor to send you a value notice before you can appeal. In some states you can appeal even if the assessor doesn't send a value notice but there are only certain times of year when you can do so. In other states you can appeal at any time, unless the assessor is sending a notice that year. Because we focus on the Southeast, and to keep this article relatively short, I will focus on the states.

In Georgia the tax assessors are now required to send every property owner and assessment notice every year. The notice will be sent sometime in the spring or summer of each year. The notice of assessed value will be dated. You will have 45 days after the date of notice to appeal your property. You can use a uniform appeal form that was developed by the state of Georgia, or you can appeal in a letter format. Your letter should provide your contact information, property identification, and what avenue of appeal you choose to take, for example, arbitration. For more information on the options available please contact us.

In South Carolina you can appeal by letter at any time, unless the County has sent you a value notice that year, in which case you have 90 days from the date of the notice to appeal. In the letter provide your name and contact information, information identifying the property that you are appealing, and any information supporting a lower value that you choose to provide.

Most North Carolina counties have appeal forms. Most require that you use their form. When the counties put out new value notices the value notice is often the appeal form as well. Read the notice carefully. You typically have 30 days to appeal the new value. If you're appealing in a non-reappraisal year call the County in January to determine when the deadline is to appeal to the Board of Review. You will need to ask the County to send you a Board of Review application. Complete this and return it before the deadline.

In Alabama you can appeal by letter. Provide your contact information, information that identifies the property that you are appealing, and any information that supports a lower value that you choose to provide. You typically have 30 days from the date of the notice to file your appeal. All supporting information must be provided at the time you appeal.

Florida has an appeal form that is available from the state. Florida assessment notices start coming out in August of every year and all the County values are out, generally, by September. Provide all of the information that the form requires, and most counties require a filing fee. Provide any information that supports a lower value that you choose to.

This concludes our brief look at what to do if you want to appeal your property tax assessment. Every state is a little bit different and it's a good idea to call the County that you're in and ask them how often they revalue and when is the time to appeal. If you need help appealing your property tax assessment contact the experts at Fair Assessments, LLC.

Here in Georgia you can appeal your Georgia property tax assessments every year. This is a new development. The law in Georgia states that you can only appeal your property tax assessment if the Board of Assessors send you a notice of value. In the past there was no guarantee that the assessors would send you an assessment notice. If you wanted to be sure that you would get an assessment notice you had to file a property tax return at a lower value than what the assessors had on their books and then if the assessors didn't agree with your value they would have to send you a notice with their value on it.

The property tax law here in Georgia changed however, due to the Georgia Gen. Assembly's impression that the assessors were not keeping up with declining values. As a result the assessors are now required to send every property owner an assessment notice every year. In the past most counties gave you 45 days to appeal an assessment notice but some only gave you 30 days. The state changed this as well making the appeal deadline 45 days for every county in the state.

Georgia property tax assessment notices start coming out in the spring and continue into the summer. Generally the first counties to get there assessment notices in the mail are Gwinnett County, and Hall County, although Hall County was a little late last year presumably because they were catching up with the changes in the property tax law. Most of the Metro Atlanta counties send out their assessment notices soon after, in April or May, and the rest of the counties notices just keep on coming out.

If you have property in South Carolina you can appeal your assessment at any time. If you appealed right now, in January, you would be appealing your tax assessment as of 2011. If you want to appeal your 2012 value you should wait until after March 1. In South Carolina you can appeal it any time provided the County you live in has not sent out assessment notices. South Carolina counties are required to reappraise every five years. If they send you an assessment notice then you have 90 days to appeal. If you don't appeal during this 90 day period then you cannot appeal until the following year.

North Carolina is a little more complicated. Most counties in North Carolina only reappraise their property every eight years. This is the maximum length of time that the state allows counties to go between reappraisals. They have the option of reappraising more often than that. Even though you can appeal your North Carolina property tax assessment every year, you are appealing the value as of the last reappraisal date. For example if the County you live in last reappraised at the top of the market, in 2007, then if you appeal now you are appealing the value of your property as of 2007 not as of 2012. You can appeal your old assessment at the beginning of the year so if you are thinking about doing this call the County now. Some counties only give you until the end of January, others have appeal periods into April. If your county is reappraising this year, then just wait for the assessment notice and follow the appeal instructions.

An Alabama all property is reappraised once every three years. The County has the option of appraising one third of their property every year or reappraising everything once every three years. Most Alabama counties send out their assessment notices in the summer but this varies County by County so if you want to be certain not to miss your appeal deadline call the County and ask them about this.

The only way to know if your assessment is correct is to do some research. Perhaps, if you're lucky, you have a good friend that is a realtor and they can provide you with some settled sales from your neighborhood. That would be a big help. Chances are that between the three recognized approaches to value, the sales comparison approach, the cost approach, and the income approach, the sales comparison approach is the only one that you can take a stab at.

You can do some research online by visiting websites like trulia.com and realtor.com to find some comparable sales in your market area. Another option is the property tax assessors website. I know many property tax assessors have excellent websites that show each and every parcel assessment and their last sale price. This is becoming more and more true since the technology needed to provide this is been getting cheaper and cheaper over the years. Now even some small rural counties surprise me by having this type of website.

Some assessor websites are very interactive and you may be able to search for sales data by neighborhood. Some are not so functional and you may have to search street by street in your neighborhood looking at every parcel to see whether there has been a sale within the past year or two. What you want are the most recent sales available. For example, most states have an effective date of appraisal of January 1. So the tax assessor will be using sales data from the prior calendar year and so should you.

You should look at your assessed value on a total value per square foot of building area basis. Then compare your value per foot to the sale price per foot of the comparable sales that you have found. If your value per foot is higher than many of the sales, that is an indication that your property may be overvalued. Of course, the sales should be as similar to your property as possible.

Another angle for appealing your property tax assessment is equity. Just as you compared your property's assessment per square foot to sales, you can also compare it to other assessments. You can compare your assessed value to all of the assessed values on your street regardless of whether or not they sold. If there are some similar houses that have a lower values that may be another reason to appeal your property tax assessment.

For more information on appealing your property tax assessment, residential property assessment appeals, or commercial property tax reduction, contact the experts at Fair Assessments LLC the property tax reduction professionals.

There are three recognized approaches to valuing real estate. They are the sale comparison approach, the cost approach, and the income approach. The cost approach is used by virtually all taxing jurisdictions. The sales comparison approach is usually used to adjust the values that were derived via the cost approach. The income approach is used on commercial properties if the County has the resources needed to use it.

The sales comparison approach is what it sounds like. It is the use of sales data compared with a subject property or subject properties in order to derive a value. It is based on the principle of contribution. If a sold property is just like your property except it has a one car garage and you have a two-car garage, then the sale price of the sold property would be adjusted upward to indicate what it would have sold for if it had a two-car garage. The resulting value can be used to estimate the value of your, superior house.

The cost approach uses an estimate of the cost to replace the subject structure with an equivalent structure of the same functionality at today's cost and construction standards. From this cost to build the improvements new an amount reflecting accrued depreciation is deducted based on the actual age and condition of the property being appraised. To that is added an estimate of the land value, and the total is an estimate of the total property value.

The income approach uses the anticipation of future benefits to value the property. The future benefits are cash flow in the form of rents. Using sales of income generating properties it can be to determine what investors are willing to pay for a dollar of income for different property types in different market areas. Armed with this knowledge appraisers can estimate the market rents for your property and apply an appropriate multiplier or capitalization rate to estimate the value.

In a previous post I talked about how the assessors use sales data to adjust all properties in a given neighborhood or market area up or down. After values are generated using one of these three approaches to value, the assessors will compare their mass appraisal values to the sales from the market area. If their cost approach sure income approaches 10% lower than sales prices than they may adjust all the values in the market up as a result. For some more information on this process go here. For help with your property tax appeal contact Fair Assessments LLC at 404-644-1667.

First let me say that there isn't a reason to not appeal your Georgia property tax unless you know for certain that your value is higher than the assessors tax value. There is a reason why there is a Georgia property tax appeal process and that reason is because the assessors can't be right all the time. As a matter of fact they should only be right some the time. In order to explain this I need to get into how the property tax assessor determines value.

When the tax assessor is trying to determine what the value is in your neighborhood, or for your property type, they have to look at the sales data that is available. For those properties that have recently sold, say in the year 2011, the assessor compares his Georgia property tax value with the sales price. If the tax assessor has enough sales in your neighborhood or for your property type he can make generalizations about values based on this. For example, if on average the assessor's Georgia property tax values are 80% of the sale prices in your neighborhood, and there are sufficient numbers of sales to make this information statistically significant, the assessor may increase all of the Georgia property tax values in the neighborhood by 10% or 15% or even 20% to get the values to where they should be.

In actuality the assessors use the median ratio of assessment to sale price to make decisions on neighborhood wide value changes. They use medians because medians are unaffected by extreme values. Now if the assessor, using this sales information and sale ratios, changes values such that their median sale ratio has an assessed value that is 100% of the sale price, that means that approximately half of the properties will be overvalued and half will be undervalued. This is why the tax assessor can only be right part of the time. It's up to you to decide if you're in that portion of properties that are overvalued or undervalued.

Given the current state of the housing market and what we've been going through for the past several years, there's little chance that the assessors will be raising values in 2012. This same process of comparing Georgia property tax assessments to sale prices can and should be used to reduce Georgia property taxes. If the median sale ratio, the ratio of assessed value to sale price, is 120% this means that the neighborhood or property type is overvalued. The tax assessor should lower all property values within this neighborhood such that the median sale ratio is near 100%. But again, half of the properties would be overvalued and half would be undervalued, even after a big reduction in value.

It's up to you to decide whether or not you want to fight City Hall, or the tax assessor. Just know that the deck is not stacked against you. You have as good a chance of getting your value reduced as your chance of getting no change in your Georgia property tax. It all depends on the neighborhood you're in or the property type you own, what the market data says, and whether you want to put in the time and effort to determine whether or not a Georgia property tax appeal is worth your time. If you don't want to jump through the hoops necessary to get a good result from your Georgia property tax appeal you may want to consider using the assistance of an expert. Here at Fair Assessments we have been helping property taxpayers get their Georgia property taxes reduced for eight years. If you need help getting your Georgia property taxes reduced please contact us.

The Georgia Association of Assessing Officials (GAAO) has released their 2012 Legislative Policy Statement. In the Policy Statement they urge the Georgia State Legislature to act on matters that they consider important to Georgia property tax. The Policy contains five main priorities:

1. Alternatives to Artificial Limitations of Property Tax Valuations - In this the GAAO is concerned that recent legislation compelling the assessors to set the tax values on sold properties at their sale price with result in inequitable assessments. For the same reason they are also concerned that the legislature will place a cap on assessment increases.

2. Correcting Valuation Errors / Statute of Limitations - The GAAO doesn't take issue with the state-wide three year refund for errors that existed for at least that long. However, they are concerned that the various counties are using different lengths of time in which to correct errors. They are encouraging the General Assembly to create a single three-year statute of limitations for the discovery, auditing, and correction of assessments.

3. Digests preparation efficiency and Simplification – The GAAO is concerned that many changes in the law have made it harder for the counties to comply with state law and submit a property tax digest in a timely manner.

4. Property Tax Exemption Applications – In this the GAAO is recommending that exemption applications be submitted by April 1 for the tax year that the exemption is sought. Currently the law is vague on a deadline.

5. Standardized Assessment Administration and Practices – Here the GAAO is concerned that the services the counties obtained from the state Department of revenue are being significantly reduced by elimination of a state property tax levy that funds the department of revenue.

As a former tax assessor employee and a property tax consultant I see no problem with these requested changes from the GAAO. Anything that simplifies the Georgia property tax code so that it is easier for everyone to understand is a good thing. If you have any questions about Georgia property tax please contact us at www.fairassessments.com.

What goes around comes around, and value weakness just won't go away. Nationally, house prices fell for the 6th straight month in October, and Atlanta house values had fallen approximately 9% from January through October. Although sales of existing and new homes are up from the depths of the recent recession (assumes that you feel it is over) and mortgage rates remain at historic lows, lending standards are still tight by anyone's standards. With all house listings competing with distressed sales value pressure is still, well, distressing.

Mr. Shiller, of Case-Shiller house price index fame, thinks residential values could fall another 10% during 2012. Foreclosure rates remain high and banks are still catching up from the robo-signing scandal from a year ago. The market may yet be flooded with even more vacant foreclosed houses. Recent house price data shows that Atlanta, and several Midwestern cities such as Detroit and S. Louis have declined at a faster rate than they did during the recession.