I'm Declaring Victory and Going Home

Today was the day in court, so to speak. There were only three appeals, so we expected to be in and out pretty quickly. Three hours later . . .

The first petitioner was an older gentleman in our village who'd based his appeal on the basis of his roof needing to be replaced (and therefore the value of the house for tax purposes should be discounted by that much). They kindly, but firmly, informed him that this was not sufficient reason to change the assessment, and that he actually had a lower assessment than the other houses he'd wanted his to be compared with.

The second petitioner had bought a new house in 2002, and wanted her assessment lowered to match those of some comparable houses in her general area. She'd prepared some good supporting material for her case, including spreadsheets of the various houses she felt were comparable for tax purposes. They shot her down pretty quickly: apparently they don't consider that the price you pay a builder for a new house to be in any way related to "market" value. Under this view, builders are irrational and do not charge the homebuyer what they should; the excess value accrues to the buyer and the tax system must claw that back as much as possible.

The houses she tried to get admitted as equivalent (even though built by the same builder to the same floorplan) were ruled to be "inferior" and therefore not allowable. Unfortunately for her, someone with a similar home must have won the jackpot because they'd sold (recently) for nearly half again what they'd paid for their house: this was deemed to be a valid comparison to her house. The adjudicator ruled that her assessment was not unfair and kept it at the current level.

Now it was our turn, and we already knew that our ace had been trumped: we couldn't use the builder's sale price as part of our evidence. We tried anyway, and to our astonishment, it was allowed. In fact, we seem to have unwittingly wrong-footed the representative from MPAC, because we mentioned that we'd received two separate assessment notices for different values (the first was about 5% more than we'd paid, the second nearly 25% more).

Because we're in a pretty fast-moving market area, we could certainly believe that the house would be worth 5% more within a couple of months of buying it, but 25%? Come on. There was no way that we could have sold the house for 125% of list price that quickly. After a few years, sure, that'd be possible, but not that soon.

We were treated to a long-ish lecture about how our builder had owned the land for such a long time that they weren't selling the houses for what they would really be worth on the open market, because they didn't need to make a profit on the land . . . or something equally economically unlikely. I rather lost the thread at that point. Anyway, during our respective summations, it became clear that he didn't think we had a leg to stand on (he wasn't openly gloating, but it was edging in that direction).

The final act was a bit of a Scrooge-to-Bob-Cratchit moment, as the adjudicator turned to us and said ". . . and in summary, I will be lowering your assessment to $XXX,XXX" — about 5% less than the lowest assessment figure we'd got. I was so sure that I'd misheard him that it was only as the MPAC rep started whining that I believed what I'd heard. The observer from the town suddenly went into a huddle with the MPAC guy, because the lowered assessment for us might have a domino effect in our entire subdivision.

Victory!