How to contest your home assessment

Thinking of contesting your property tax bill? Anyone can fight City Hall, but your odds of winning get a lot better if you're organized, polite and familiar with the system.

For the most part, when homeowners contest a property tax bill, the point of disagreement is the value the assessor placed on the home. So if this year's bill seems high, look at the value the assessor has placed on your home.

In some cases, the amount of the assessed value will be printed directly on the paperwork you get from the local assessor. On other bills, it's not as easy. You'll have to do a little math to figure out how much assessors estimate your home is worth. If it's not explicit, call the assessor's office and ask them how to use your bill to calculate your home's value.

Once you have the value, ask yourself two questions.

First, could I sell my home for more? "If the answer is yes, you probably should not appeal," says Paul Welcome, the county appraiser for Johnson County, Kan., and the past president of the International Association of Assessing Officers.

Second, is the value in line with similar homes in the area? Unless all the homes have been overvalued, or unless your home's condition warrants lowering the value, there's probably not much you can do. But if the value is out of line with similar homes in the area, you may have a case for reduction.

That was the situation for Miami resident Frank Adler. In the 1990s, he received a bill that valued his five-bedroom, four-bath home at $35,000 more than he estimated it was worth. "I knew this wasn't true," recalls Adler, who has since written a book, "How to Reduce Your Property Taxes."

"I researched the whole thing," he says. "I had to talk to real estate people. I had to talk to an attorney. I was able to put together what they were looking for at this administrative hearing. I showed comparables and the condition of my house."

And he got his bill corrected. "Don't just take the bill and accept it," Adler says. "Learn what the bill means. Investigate what the real real estate circumstances are at this time."

If you find out there may have been an error, "follow through by getting the evidentiary material you need, and go down there and protest," he says.

Learn the rules
Your local assessing organization will have a system for correcting or contesting assessments. The process can vary widely by jurisdiction. Understanding how the system works will give you a huge advantage.

"I would recommend that they find out through their assessor all the required deadlines and retrieve all the required forms up front," says Paul Damato, partner in the Long Island law firm Murphy & Lynch PC and a practitioner concentrating on property valuation and assessment reductions. "You don't want to learn this as you stumble through."

Either call or go online to answer a few questions:

• What are the deadlines?
• What is the grievance period?
• What are the various levels of appeal? For instance, some jurisdictions allow you to make an informal request to correct a home valuation before you have to go through a formal appeals process.
• What paperwork will you need?
• If you're challenging the value of your home, what type of information do the assessors need and in what format do they need it? Some will accept a spreadsheet that you've put together, others might need something more official. It pays to check.

"You need to find out if the jurisdiction offers, and most do, how to prepare an appeal," says Welcome.

Contesting your home's value
There are three basic reasons to contest the assessed value of your home: the assessing office has incorrect information about the characteristics of your property, your property needs significant repairs, or your property is not valued similarly to comparable homes in the area.