1912 Real estate and taxes

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Yesterday I read about and listened to discussion of New York State property taxes. The rankings range from "175% of the average", to "sixth highest in the nation", which is not the biggest concern. The greatest concern is that they keep going up, by ridiculous amounts, every year, and there's no end in sight. Most people blame the school budgets, but the county budgets contribute.

My house is paid off, so I have no mortgage or rent, but the real estate taxes on my house (which is about mid-line in value) amount to over $500 per month. And I get a senior exemption. My neighbors pay higher.

There's an amusing blog I follow - http://lovelylisting.blogspot.com/, "It's Lovely! I'll Take It!" - wherein the blogger shows photos from real estate listings, the type of photos that make you wonder what the sellers were thinking, "do they really want to sell this house?" You can click on a link in the post and go to the actual listing. I've been doing that because I like looking at houses for sale. (If showing houses was all that was required, I'd have been very happy as a realtor. Too bad you have to go out and drum up business, too. I can't do that.) Anyway, check the blog out.

So after thinking about taxes, I wondered what others were paying, and I went to some of the listings to find out. For comparison I used not what the sellers were asking for the house, but the tax assessed value. NYS counties try to use actual value (and that "actual value" is usually higher than you'd get for the house if you tried to sell it). Other places seem to use a value much smaller than the market value. So if the assessed value of a comparable house was $100k elsewhere, I multiplied the amount of tax paid by 5 to compare it to an assessed value of $500k here.

What I discovered is very upsetting.

In the Los Angeles area, Seattle, Boston, Washington DC suburbs, and everywhere else I looked, I'm paying anywhere from three to eight times what they're paying.

For what?
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