||| FROM DAVID ECKLUND |||
Our property change of value increased 100% for tax year 2023. Many residents incurred the same or higher. Why? Because buyers paid sellers the inflated prices they were asking and of course the sellers accepted-who wouldn’t? Washington State mandates that counties can only go back 14 months of real estate appraisals to compile their New Value amounts. This new value amount is then divided by 1000 and multiplied by the new tax levy the assessor develops.
Unless the 2023 levy is greatly reduced my property taxes for 2023 will double. Yours may as well. The solution is for the WA legislature to pass new statutes allowing for three, five, or seven year averaging of the appraisals and levy amount. Many states provide residents with reduced property taxes if they meet all of the following requirements: age 65 or older, property is owner’s full-time residence, and primary sources of income for the owner are retirement accounts – not earned income. Why doesn’t WA have such an exemption?
We all need to write to our legislators — Liz.lovelett@leg.wa.gov, debra.lekanoff@leg.wa.gov, and alex.ramel@leg.wa.gov and ask them to remedy this problem. Also, contact John Kulseth our SJC assessor and ask the levy amount for 2023 be greatly reduced.
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WAC 458-07-030: “Sales of the property being appraised or sales of comparable properties that occurred within five years of January 1st of the assessment year are valid indicators of true and fair value.
The assessor’s office provided a list of all SJC single residences sales used for this year’s new assessment valuations … it was for sales from January 2021 thru April 2022. No idea why they used any 2022 sales data since that appears to be outside the legal date limits, but they may have a logical explanation. Since sales prices were increasing quite strongly each of those months, so that may have inflated the average sales increased percentage.
Sales prices were, in my opinion, largely driven by historically low mortgage rates, which for many were less than 2%. The SJC assessor appears to have selected the highest period possible to calculate sale price percentage increase. That’s legal except possibly for the four months of 2022 sales.
State law (same WAC) also states that assessors can also consider existing interest rates and how they might effect the historic level of sales prices. That apparently did not happen in SJC.
My detailed increases also used two overlapping tax map areas the algorithm uses. One area increased by 48%. The second area increased by 20%. WOW … a 68% increase! No … the algorithm multiplied those to two increases, with the final result being a 98% increase in structures values after all the other adjustments in the algorithm were applied … and that was after the annual property depreciation based on age was calculated!
I’ve been a citizen observer of property assessments for more that 20 years, but only for the last two years in SJC. I’ve NEVER seen anything even close to both the variation and level of value increases in SJC’s 2022 property assessments.
The Board of Equalization is likely to have a crowded schedule … and filings have to be delivered or postmarked within 30 days of the Change of Value notice. That’s this coming week for most SJC taxpayers.