My buddy Dan didn’t quite get how they work so I had to do a little explaining’ on why this Prop A thing we did way back yonder is actually a good thing.
Now, I’ve got a question for the three of you that read this blog: I bought my house in Dec. 2006. I haven’t done much of anything to improve the value of it over the last two years. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that my home’s lost value and my property taxes should be decreasing. Unfortunately the township considers my house to be worth every penny I paid for it in 2006. Don’t get me wrong, if it actually is I’ll be ecstatic, but I doubt that’s the case and don’t want to pay any more in property taxes than I have to.
What kind of documentation do I need for this? Would an appraisal do it?
I would say clicking on the following will seemingly do well:
http://www.google.com/search?q=michigan+property+tax+appeal
You may want to include your county for a little more specific results.
Surprisingly, quite a number of the results are helpful suggestions by the Michigan government – puzzler that.
Have you heard of the American Community Survey? They send this giant book of intrusive questions and threaten you if you don’t answer. It’s incredible.
just for info’s sake. Here in Butler Co. OHIO you get an adjustment appeal form from the county auditor’s office and they “appraise” your house again. They simply take more time and look a the parameters closley to make a better judgement of value…..Hope this helps!
Hey Justin,
I would say that you are probably right about your home value decreasing. Since we live less than 5 miles away from each other, I think we can probably say that our homes have changed in value by roughly the same amount. I got an appraisal done in late 2006 which was $X. I just got another appraisal done (early 2009) to take advantage of the low interest rates and it came out to $Y. $Y was 83% of $X. That SUCKED! That pretty much wiped out our 20% down payment… Insane!
Anyways… So you’d think we would be paying 83% of our taxes. So far that is not the case. Without appealing our taxes, our taxable value actually increased, though only by a very small margin. But yeah, I don’t see how it can possibly go up. I know it is very confusing though and it is not just about the appraised value. There are variables in there that deal with “capping system”, though it will always increase until we hit that cap. And since we have not lived in our houses very long, we have not hit the cap yet. I am not 100% sure on this, but these are things I’ve heard in the local news lately.
Anyways, might give you more things to google about.
Peace out!
Owners should do homework before appealing property taxes
http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2009/03/owners_should_do_homework_befo.html
It is a Michigan article on tax appeals.