Focus on Property Taxes

We've seen a couple of mailers in the past couple of weeks that have been telling us that our property is eligible for reassessment at a lower value, and a huge property tax savings could be ours. For the low, low price of $179, these fine people will be happy to do a review of your property value and submit the necessary documentation to the County Assessor's office for you.

You may have seen one of these as well. Sometimes, they come on nice, official looking forms, giving them an air of authenticity and authority. One of them I saw even said that if you don't file before a certain date, a $30 late fee would apply.

I really hope I'm preaching to the choir here - don't do it.

I'm not going to call this a scam, because for all I know, these folks will do exactly what they say they'll do. But it is a waste of your money. They aren't doing anything that you can't already do for yourself, and in most cases, you'll learn that the County Assessor has already done it for you.

We had a presentation today from Joe Holland, the Santa Barbara County Assessor. He comes to speak to the Lompoc Valley real estate community about once a year, and he's quite informative. One of the topics of the day dealt with this. We've known this for some time, but it might be news to some of you: the Assessor's office is proactively going through property records and reducing the assessed values for properties where it is appropriate. They reduced the assessed value on 13,956 properties in the county last year, approximately 11% of the total parcels in the county. I can personally attest to this - they reassessed ours last year, and I expect that they will again this year.

Yeah, that's right - you won't hear this one often: There's a government agency out there that's trying to make things right and lower your taxes where it's appropriate.

That's not to say that they'll be perfect, although I thought that they got it right with ours last year. If you believe that your property is worth less than the assessed value, or if they've reassessed it and you think they're still higher than fair market value, click here. This will give you a quick overview of how this works, and a link to a form you can fill out and submit.

If you need help with some of the sold comps they need, call us. Heck, we won't even charge you $1.79...