January Your Only Month to Deal with Property Taxes
January 12th, 2009
Once you recover from the Holiday season and the calendar changes, you now have only the month of January to do any official complaining about your property tax bill. Filing an Abatement with your town Assessor’s Office is the process you will need to go thru in order to dispute your home valuation.
Most town deadlines is the month of January. Therefore, the time to educate yourself on the process and collect all the necessary information is limited.
From my perspective, I have seen too many people (including myself) attempt to go thru the process of abatement, and it usually is unsuccessful. Before you attempt it, learn all you can about the way the individual towns evaluate property values and then attempt to collect factual data to support your case. Unless you have solid data, you don’t have a chance.
For an example of the frustrations of this process, a recent Boston Globe update on Holliston tax rates and assessments said the town is evaluated at 95% of market values but the Town Website FAQ’s describe the town as being evaluated at 100% of market values. Which is it??
Even with 10 years as a Realtor, and experience with going thru the process, there is no textbook on how to be successful. Frankly, they denied my applications without any reason, just a denial letter. I personally feel the town needs to clearly give a reason for the denials and why the data does not qualify to reduce a taxpayers tax bill.
Almost all towns in our Metrowest area evaluates property values based upon 95-100% market values.
Even though residential property values have declined in Holliston, the town had to raise the tax rate in order to pay the town’s bills. In years of increasing property values (ie. 1998-2004), the property tax rate should have dropped to stay at steady spending levels. Unfortunately new ways to spend tax rolls seems to find its way into the budgets.
The moral of the story, you can fight the tax man, but they usually win without explanation. If you have the stamina, get a Realtor to do an analysis of market values for the previous tax year, and get those forms into the Assessors Office prior to February.
Ed Daniels of Re/Max Executive Realty and The MAhome Team would be happy to provide interested readers with recent sold home statistics to help in the process of abatements. He can be reached at 508-341-7880 or Ed@MAhome.com.Categories: Holliston, Real Estate
This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Holliston, Real Estate. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
