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

[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.