County's Property Value Assessment - How to win a dispute?

[davsel]

I just received my county property value assessment and they raised the value 50K over last year and want an additional $600 in taxes this year.
I have until 1 June to dispute it.

I purchased the property in November 2013 and the VA Assessment came in well over what I paid for it.
The county now says it's worth 75K more than the assessment.

Has anyone filed a dispute with the county?
I have never done this and just wanted to try to get some info on how it's done successfully.

I do not plan on selling the property, so I'd like to save some money on taxes and have the County's value lowered.
I'm also researching other options to lower the taxes through Ag exemptions and such.

[Jeff350]

You are not alone. My house in Centennial (Arapahoe County) went up 45%. A friend also in Arapahoe had his property go up almost 60%!

[Ridge]

You are not alone. My house in Centennial (Arapahoe County) went up 45%. A friend also in Arapahoe had his property go up almost 60%!

Hahahaha holy crap. Yeah I'd fight that with every spare moment I had.

[BigBear]

Everyone's is going up even if you live in the slum.... "They" are trollin' for more tax money, they never have enough.

[Dave_L]

Mine went up by about 30% also (if I remember the notice correctly).

[Wulf202]

I'm interested too. Im expecting to have to fight aurora on this.

Weld county went up 5%

[thvigil11]

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.

[cmailliard]

Mine went up $70,000 ($290,000 - $360,000) in Adams County. There was a story on the news about this the other day.

[Irving]

Mine went up, but to an amount that was slightly less than it appraised for.

[Dave_L]

What's the benefit of having a higher county placed value? Resale prices don't seem to care about that.