Quote:
Originally Posted by DickR
I would think that a big headache for any town's assessor department would be defending or be forced to adjust an assessment based on someone arguing some point or another. The fairest way to deal with this is to have a computerized system that weighs all the hard data associated with any particular property, assigning some kind of relative value to any aspect of that property as derived from data collected from many property sales, to come up with a total computer-generated valuation. If all properties are valued the same way, the valuation for any property is defensible. The owner would have to challenge the validity of the data describing the property in order to get a total assessment reduced. There should not be any "judgement" made by an assessor as to what a particular property ought to sell for.
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I agree that an assessor should not be deciding how much a property is worth. However, he might decide that a property has an excellent view and that "data" could be plugged into a computer program that evaluates how much a "view" is worth in comparative properties. That would be the same as observing there is a brick fireplace and the computer program then calculating the value of that feature. Or, noting the address of the property and that is classified as a desirable neighborhood that commands higher prices. I believe that most of the assessing services do exactly this, feeding the property information into a computer. However, at some point a program makes a comparison to other existing, recently sold properties and "judges" that your property is roughly equivalent considering this "feature". Just because the computer works the numbers it doesn't make it more precise. By the nature of the process, the evaluation has to have some "slop" in the calculations.