What You Need to Know about Revaluation
By Nicholas Mercier | CPOA President at June 29, 2024 | 8:00 am | Print
With the spectre of property revaluation looming it is important for property owners to understand just what this process means and how it affects their taxes. In Connecticut, municipalities are required to revalue properties once every five years. During this process assessors inspect all properties within a municipality and determine what the properties fair market value. Municipalities then assess the property value at 70% of that “fair market” price. This assessed value is what is used for calculating your tax bill each year.
To give an example, if your home was determined to have a fair market value of $200,000 then its assessed value would be $140,000 (70 percent of the fair market value). That value is then used to determine your tax bill based on the mill rate, so with a mill rate of 36 mills your annual property taxes would be $5,040. This is important to home owners, because an inflated assessment can lead to paying far too much in taxes. Assume for a moment that in the previous example that home had been incorrectly assessed at a value of $250,000. The resulting tax bill would have been $6,300, that is a 25 percent increase!
Fortunately there is a process by which you can appeal your revaluation if you feel that your property’s value may have been incorrectly assessed. If you feel your property assessment is incorrect you may write a letter to the City Assessor to review your property’s assessment. In that letter you must include your name, the address of the property in question, and that you want your assessment reviewed. This letter must be submitted before October 1st in order to affect your next tax bill.
If you are unsatisfied with the decision of the City Assessor you may take your case to the Board of Assessment Appeals. If you wish to do so you must submit a written application to the Board by Feb. 20 following the Oct. 1 assessment. The Board meets and reviews all applications and meets to hear appeals in March. If you are still unsatisfied you have the chance to appeal their decision in Superior Court. However, you only have two months after the Board mails their decision to do so, so don’t put it off!
Most often assessments are carried out in a fair and professional manner. There can, however, be honest mistakes in an evaluation. During a revaluation cycle assessors are looking at thousands of properties. It is only reasonable to expect that they may occasionally make clerical errors or errors in judgment that could affect your property’s assessed value. While these errors are understandable they can end up costing you thousands over the course of a valuation cycle. That is why as property owners we must be diligent in reviewing our property’s assessed value to ensure that we are not paying more than our fair share.
Mercier writes a story once a month based on concerns of members of the Citizens Property Owners Association.
