Hello everyone,

We've been feverishly trying to keep up with assessment notices that have been released in Northwest Indiana in recent months, and are still waiting for a few townships to release theirs.

In Porter County, all notices have gone out and it appears that the trend has been an overall increase for residential properties and little or no change, in commercial and industrial properties.  In fact I've seen some commercial decreases.  What does this mean?  Basically this years' Porter County tax bills will probably show a small shift of burden from businesses to homeowners.

I've had a little experience helping a few friends of mine recently with their residntial assessments, which are generally hard to contest.  In this particular case however, we had a small, distinct neighborhood that had been grouped with a few, more popular developments around them, and based on a detailed appraisal analysis it was determined that the subject neighborhood trending factor was simply creating assessments that were well above market value.

The assessor was very good too work with and in fact, the end result was a segregation of the subject neighborhood into it's own specific neighborhood.  Their were enough reasonable sales to create a separate trending factor, and when applied, the assessments were within 2% of market value.

This is important in that it demonstrates that the conversion to market value and the resulting delineation of neighborhoods is a detailed and painstaking process that takes time.  Now that assessors have been able to record sales for a longer period, it becomes easier to delineate neighborhoods and to insure that values are reflective of true market value, thus insuring fair and equitable taxation.

In Lake County, we are still waiting for commercial assessments basically north of US highway 30.  Highland, Munster, Hammond, East Chicago, Whiting, Gary, Griffith, Lake Station, Hobart and Merrillville being the major cities yet to release values.  I believe that the delay is to coordinate the release of assessments with the release of tax bills so that taxpayers can relate the assessment to the actual taxes.  In reality, an assessment could be set at $1 or $1 million and without knowing the tax rate, it is meaningless.  I do know for a fact that commercial industrial property values in Lake are going UP.

I do encourage anyone to give me a call or send me an email with any questions or concerns.   Whether you have received a notice yet or not, the key is to be prepared to appeal as early as possible and not to be restricted by the 45 day appeal deadline.

Remember that trending is now an annual occurence and it is more important than ever to be ready to deal with your tax assessment.  I'm sorry to make this sound like an ad or commercial, but I can't tell you how many of my clients would have saved an extra years' worth of tax if they had been a little more proactive.

Have a good one folks!