For most folks who love their home and have no plans to sell or move, one of your most costly recurring expenses is probably some sort of property tax, or a combination of them.
There are millions of articles out there on the best ways to prepare your home for sale. But what about preparing to stay, and dealing with a reassessment or revaluation that may be inaccurately boosting your local property taxes beyond what you should be paying?
Our first query went to Vision Government Solutions, a leading supplier of land management software technology and services to local government organizations, enabling efficient assessment, billing, collections, mapping, and permitting.
According to Vision, the purpose of a revaluation is not to raise taxes, but to create an equitable distribution of the tax load. A revaluation is the process of performing all of the necessary Market Analysis and Valuation steps to determine accurate and equitable values for all properties within a municipality.
Before a local revaluation, the first thing officials for the Town Of Rocky Hill, Conn., believe property owners should do, is familiarize themselves with a few important terms they may hear during the process of a local reassessment or revaluation:
• The grand list or ledger – This is the tabulation of all real and personal property within a Town compiled annually. The real property is the real estate.
• Assessment – An assessment typically equals 70 percent of the market value estimate at the time of the revaluation. That 70 percent ratio may be applied to all real and personal property.
• Mill rate – A mill rate is the expression of taxes per every thousand dollars of assessed value. For example, a mill rate of 26.6 would mean that taxes would be $26.60 for every $1,000 of assessed value. Mill rates are established by dividing the Town’s proposed upcoming annual budget by the total of the taxable assessments in Town. The total taxable assessments reflect the summation for all the taxable real estate, motor vehicles, and business personal property.
