Ok folks in Montpelier, if you haven't gotten your brand new 2010 reappraisal in the mail yet, it's a-comin'!
As you may know the state mandates each town to reassess when the assessed values fall to 80% of market values. In Montpelier, that happened a couple of years ago, but there were some, um, issues with that re-assessment. So it was done again in 2009.
When you get your new assessment, you're going to go bananas. (Keep reading for some comforting words.) Just remember that you can challenge the value. The city has a guideline, but basically you can challenge based only on these three criteria:
•1. You think the value is wrong. That's a pretty vague one, so more or less, if you want to challenge the assessment, you can.
•2. You don't think your property was fairly compared with others.
•3. There was some mistake in the assessment. As a personal example, the assessor called me earlier in the year asking about the deck on a rental property. There is no deck...but we did file a permit to build one. That's the kind of thing that if it shows up on the new assessment, I could challenge. Will I? I don't know...it partly depends on if I'm more ornery or more busy when the time comes for me to make that decision.
Just because your value is going up (and you can be pretty sure it's going up), that doesn't necessarily mean that your taxes are going up. Here's what I mean:
•1. The City of Montpelier figures out its budget
•2. Voters approve it (homeowners and renters)
•3. Add up ALL the assessed values to come up with the Grand List
•4. The new tax rate is the Grand List divided by the Voter-Approved-Budget
Hey, your tax rate is going to go down, yippee! Your tax bill probably isn't though.
Also, before you go sharpening your axes, let me just tell you that although I am an expert in Montpelier real estate, I do not represent homeowners in challenging assessments. If you ask VERY nicely, I'll pull comps for you, and then you can take them to your meeting. But you have to ask VERY nicely. And you have to tell your friends what a great realtor I am. Cookies help, too.
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