House Assessments

I need to talk for a bit about house assessments in Allegheny County.  There is a huge uproar right now because all the houses in Allegheny County are being reassessed.  Personally, I think it's about time.  I know my opinion is not going to be popular but I hope if you're reading this and disagree that you can at least hear me out and respond in comments if you have information I don't.

Before I say anything that someone might object to, I want to say that from my understanding the new assessments are just realigning everyone.  It doesn't automatically mean your taxes will go up.  In fact, in some cases, taxes will go down even though your assessment value on your house went up.  (Actually, from what I hear as well, pretty much every single house has a higher assessment now.)  So people are reacting before we have seen how it will affect the actual taxes paid.

Previously, reassessments had been done to align to the year 2002.  To me, that means that assessments should have been the fair market value in 2002.  However, looking at the numbers they had previously, I think all of those assessments were low compared to the fair market value.  I'm going to use my numbers just because it's public record.  In 2002, the house I was going to buy was assessed at around $82,000.  Fair market value should mean what the house would sell for at that time, but the going rates were higher than that.  Regardless, that doesn't matter as long as all the houses are assessed equally.  At the time they were.  My neighbors on either side were also in the lower $80,000 as well as other houses in the same plan that were equivalent.

In 2005 I bought my house for $117,900.  The assessment value on my house was immediately changed to $117,900 based on the fair market value at the time, which they considered should be based on what I was willing to pay for the house.  I would have been fine with that If the other houses in the area had also had their assessments raised to the 2005 "fair market value."  But because they hadn't bought their houses, they were left at the 2002 values (which weren't equivalent to fair market value).  So here I am, with a bill based on a little over $35,000 more than the equivalent houses in my housing plan.  I tried to fight it in court and lost.  I tried using the argument spot assessment and they told me this wasn't spot assessment, even though I pulled the definition from the PA constitution and it fit my case.

What's funny is that this has now been called spot assessment by the state.  See a news article here from 2009.  It talks exactly about my situation.

A few years later I was able to go to court again and get my assessment value reduced to $100,000.  I only could do that because I argued that housing prices were falling and my house wouldn't sell for what I had bought it for.  And I finally got it down.  But it was (and is) still more than $15,000 higher than the other equivalent houses in the neighborhood.

I am actually happy about the reassessments.  Yes, my assessment value has gone up from $100,000 to $109,000 with the new standard.  But as long as that is equivalent to the other houses in the neighborhood, I am not going to complain.  By the way, just looking at the housing market, I do think that $109,000 is around what my house would sell for right now and is therefore the current fair market value.

Yes, my taxes are likely to go down because I will be compared to equivalent houses and I have been paying more than they have.  But I've been paying more than my neighbors for 6 years now, just because I bought a house more recently than they have.  Is that really fair?  It's certainly not going to encourage people to buy in Allegheny County if things don't change.  That's what they are trying to do here- to align everything so it is more fair.

If they reassessed your house to a value that is higher than equivalent houses around you, then I agree, it should be contested and I hope you win in court.  But if it's equal, I'd say wait and see how the taxes come out.  It might not be as dire as everyone is thinking right now.

I need to say that there's an assumption I made that taxes are not going to be raised, they are going to be redistributed evenly.  If taxes are raised, however, the issue isn't with the assessment value of houses in the county but with the fact that taxes were raised (and maybe they tried to hide it in the reassessment effort).

I reserve the right to delete any comments that personally attack me.  Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and has the right to disagree.  But I will not leave something up here that makes things personal.