Feeling the effects of housing.
April 7th, 2008 by Grant in: Real EstateI just received the 2008 tax valuation from my county treasurer. It’s clear that my local housing industry is feeling the effects of the national housing “crisis”, as the appraised value of my house increased less than 1% this year. Compare this to last year where the increase was 4.9%, and the year before when the valuation increased 6%.
Truthfully I’m not terribly disappointed about this, nor am I shocked. Other areas around the country are seeing the value of homes actually decrease, so I’m counting my blessings that my area isn’t yet in that boat.
Looking around the real estate market, there are a ton of houses on the market, and the area is certainly overbuilt. Commercial real estate is even more so. There have been strip malls built that have been vacant for 6 months or more, but curiously this has not deterred builders from building more commercial space.
The current state of the local market makes it attractive to buy a house, but I’d hate to have to sell one right now.
How about your area? Are your valuations still positive?
Tags: housing | Real Estate
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April 7th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I don’t give much credence to assesments from the the county or city. They consistently lag the market, and never actually revise down - they just don’t assess up a s much. Asessments are just for taxes as I see it.
April 8th, 2008 at 4:33 am
Assessments increases are too high no matter what!
Still though, the market in my area (NE NJ) is still moving but slowly. I’ve had three friends (2 Buy, 1 Sell) in the last two months for reasonable prices.
April 11th, 2008 at 7:32 am
I think the value of the family home is not the important as it is pretty relative - unless you have done someting to significantly increase the value. If you want to sell your home and buy a new one, you will get the same sort of size/quality of new house no matter what the market is doing as not only the value of your property changes. If you are using housing as an investment then that is a whole different ball game.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:40 am
Where SomeGal and I live assessments are only done every 4-6 years typically. Different counties use different methods — but in general it will be lower than fair market value. There has been some recent discussion on blogs about challenging assessments in order to lower real estate taxes, which is definitely worth considering. There are a few cases, though, where you may actually want to consider NOT doing so even if you are over-assessed. The most obvious one is if you are planning to sell soon. Basically a lot of property valuation websites such as Zillow look at tax appraisal info as part of the calculation. Also, more savvy consumers may look at auditors’ websites for the same purpose. In those cases it may be a benefit to have a high appraised/assessed value. There’s a lot more detail and some links on my blog article about this at Hunting Happinness.
Still, a 1% increase in this market isn’t too bad at all! In our area FMV is down at least 5% although as I mentioned that isn’t reflected in tax appraisals due to the long lag between them.
April 13th, 2008 at 6:33 am
Hi,
So try to estimate the decrease of the value in euros.
Suppose your house value was $200, 000 a year ago.
It was €148,000.
Now it is worth say $198,000.
It equals only about € 125,000.
Can you see the difference.
GL