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I used to work for a New Mexico Assessor's office. I believe the laws in CO are similar, but here we go.
In NM
Within the accepted period, you can file a protest. The county will have a period in order to informally arbitrate this protest, during this time, it would be one on one conversations with an county official, negotiating an agreement. If an agreement cannot be made within a period of time, the protest will move on to a formal hearing. In NM the board is made up of a member of NM State Tax and Revenue and several local appointed members (usually they are people connected with the real estate industry) at the formal hearing, both sides will present their info and a decision will be reached by the board. As far as I know, CO is very similar to this.
That being said. There are several ways to approach this when Residential property is concerned. There are two main way to value residental property. Replacement value (including appropriate depreciation) also known as Cost Approach and Market value also known as Sales Approach. Most current appraisal theory states that the sales approach is the most accurate way. Basically, comparable sales (like properties ie same number of bed, bath, style, location, etc) will show what a target property should be worth. The cost approach is better used when there are few comparable sales in order to make a value judgement.
When sale prices are running high, realtors and tax folks love the sales method, while homeowner love the cost approach. When prices are low, its the opposite. The issue with property tax, is that a variety of state laws jump in that interfer with valueing the house at appropriate levels. New Mexico has a great one, search "New Mexico Tax Lightning" for more info. As far as handling a protest, from the property owner standpoint. Understand that your home value is based on an average of what many similar homes to yours are selling for, not what you paid for your particular home. Many times though, the comparable sales have been cherry picked by the assessor, realtor or even property owner. The more comparable sales you can bring to the protest, the more firepower you will have to dispute your value. (assuming that the comparable sales say that your home is overvalued) But if you happened to get a great deal on your home, you might be out of luck, if the comparable sales say that you should have paid more. Searching MLS and even contacting a local realtor are good ways to get comparable sales figures. As for the cost approach, you should know that the replacement cost will be figured again based on average cost to replace something, not what you might be able do it for.
Davsel is correct in looking into the variety of exemptions that are available as well. Many of these are underpublished.
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Mine went up, but still WAY under the appraisal I just had done, and WAY over what I bought it for.... so I guess I can't be too pissed.
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It's usually not too bad, find some close properties use their assessments as well as comps and usually they will back down quite a bit.
Last time around they upped our house by 100K and after using Zillow and the assessor page to back up my argument I got them to split the difference which was actually fair.
Our previous house in Douglas County was a nightmare, they upped the value by about 25% making our house by far the highest valued in the neighborhood even though it was firmly in the middle. I went the normal route of disputing the assessment but they refused to budge and we ended up having to go to arbitration. For that hearing I had my realtor pull comps and do a market analysis, just like we would have if we were trying to sell, and combined that with info for other houses from the assessor site.
It was pretty funny, the assessor called and made one offer which we refused, and then stopped us in the hallway before our hearing and made another offer. We had so much data we weren't budging. When we met with the arbitrator he basically asked the assessor why he was wasting everyone's time and agreed with our number.
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I forgot to add that most counties these days are using mass appraisal methods. So instead of looking at you particular home, finding comparable sales, and then assigning a value, now they are doing bulk appraisal that is based on some pretty fancy algorithms, computers and SWAG. These mass appraisal systems will look at total sales in a given grouping (usually this is done by region, here they use school zones) Those sales will be intricately broken down by the computer by available characteristics and the output will guess what the total value for the entire group should go up or down (usually up). The problem here is sometimes your sales are all apples, but the mass appraisal system guesses at oranges. For example the majority of the sales may be 4 bed, 2 bath, 2 car ranch homes. The system sees that these homes are selling at an increase of 20%. The system is able to break down these sales figures into its core components and its used to assign a value change to other homes that might not be selling. IE, (4 bed, 2 bath, 2 car ranch homes go up 20%) so the computer's algorithms say that all the (2 bed, 1 baths, 1 cars in the area should increase by 15%), (3 bed, 2 baths, 1 cars in the area should increase by 17%), (3 bed, 2 baths, 2 cars in the area should increase by 19%) even though not a single one of these properties has sold.
Fun huh? So the best way to fight these Mass Appraisal value increases is to protest the property valuation. By doing this, the assessors office now has to either defend its mass appraisal system, (which few of the employees fully understand) or justify your particular value using comparable sales. Again, bringing in your own comparable sales will help you (as long as the sales support the home owners opinion of value). Bring them all in though, the home owner cherry picking sales is not a good idea. For starters, the assessors office probably has access to the sales you didn't pick. Second, if you go to the formal hearing, cherry picking makes the homeowner look like an ass.
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And if the new assessed values are under what homes are selling for around the home, you're stuck? I guess it's a good problem to have but my taxes were already $2200 for a 200k home. :(
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Guess I should feel lucky, my assessed value only increased 25%
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Here is some info from Douglas County: http://www.douglas.co.us/assessor/2015-reappraisal/. Check with your respective county of residence, as the rules should be the same, and the process similar.
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Mine went up as well. About $110,000. Another nail in the coffin for leaving here
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I successfully protested my assessment a few years ago.
I had put a new roof on and because of the permit, they raised value by about 10%.
I disputed and provided compatible home values and recent sales to show that they were crazy.
I also commented that a new roof was not an increase in valuation, I was bringing the home up to past condition.
Here is the county website to search your property and find compatibles.
http://land.elpasoco.com/
HTH
Roger
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Is their assessment right or wrong on value? Is it close to what comps are selling for?
