Reassessment: The greatest gift of all?
It’s a day before Christmas, and there’s one present that loads of homeowners want more than any: a property reassessment.
Jennifer Steinhauer, a reporter with the New York Times News Service, wrote an interestin feature that showed up in Sunday newspapers across the country yesterday. in it, she writes about the escalating number of homeowners who are asking their local governments to reassess the values of their homes.
The reason? Home values in many parts of the country are dropping. The owners of these homes, then, should also be seeing their property taxes drop accordingly. That won’t happen, though, if their homes are still assessed as they were during the residential real estate boom.
Find a reporter’s standpoint, this is an exciting time to be covering residential real estate. There’s always something new happening. This nationwide demand for reassessments is just one more example. Who can imagine a property owner in, say, Phoenix asking for his home to be reassessed two years ago? But today? The value of that same property owner’s home has probably tumbled. After that home’s reassessed today, this homeowner will be shelling out less on his property tax bill.
Not surprisingly, local governments aren’t thrilled with this. Many of them relied heavily upon rising property taxes to help fund their programs. What will they rely upon if they are forced to collect less in property tax revenue each year?
That last is a good question. It’s also a good example of how it wasn’t just individuals who relied far too heavily on this country’s residential real estate boom. We as a nation became fat and happy during the housing boom, letting artificially high real estate prices cover up other more serious issues, whether those issues be personal debt or governmental budget shortfalls.
Well, the real estate boom is over. It’s time for both individuals and governments to come up with some other revenue source.
What makes me think that a growing number of our rather unimaginative governmental bodies are going to be turning even more frequently to casinos?
