Many times when blanket assessments are done on homes, the resulting values are inaccurate and a result of a ”quick fix” mentality. Often adjustments are made using a factor or multiplier to adjust values. Not that a blanket reappraisals accuracy is much better, because it also suffers from lack of diligence to detail.

Ask yourself: if you were an appraisal company bidding on a municipal revaluation contract and your winning bid had only a $40 margin allocated for every home you needed to appraise, how much time would you spend on each property? Being a businessman, you would want to make a profit, so you have to cut out the time spent on each property. Compound that by a hired hand that may have little experience and you could have a hit and miss mess as a result.

Errors frequently occur when blanket appraisers do their job. Furthermore, if the original assessment was in error, employing multipliers to roll over previous years assessments is invalid.

If town internal structures spoke and cooperated closely, blanket assessments would not be necessary. Building inspectors would pass on their information from individual renovations and additions to the tax assessors. New built home market values can likewise be converted to reflect accurate values for the town?s homes and properties.

A tax assessor has little time to appraise a home and usually do not engage in that activity. Tax assessors are often politically appointed and are not trained and experienced real estate appraisers. Their usual method of deriving value is based on a cost basis instead of a market value approach. The market value approach is based on what an informed buyer would pay for the home, not what it cost to build it.

In a property tax appeal, only the market appraisal counts. That means that your home stacks up to the current selling price of your comparable homes and that becomes the only solid evidence of value.

A huge amount of money is spent on blanket municipal appraisals. Sure they may catch the occasional patio or shed built without a permit, but that does not warrant the extra appraisal cost.

This spells out gigantic loopholes for homeowners. Doing a simple analysis of your home’s market value and seeing how it lines up with the appraised value can save thousands of dollars wasted on taxes.

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