West View Terrace sits in a neighborhood that’s about 20 years old. The houses are mostly a similar style, generally in pretty good shape. So their values probably change at a similar rate, right?
Wrong.
This year, one house went up by $7,000. Its across-the-street neighbor dropped by $6,300.
One home’s valuation climbed $10,800 while a nearby home that’s almost the same size held steady.
Overall, of the 10 homes on the cul-de-sac, six went up in valuation, two went down and two saw no change at all.
What’s going on here?
County Appraiser Gary Post has two words for it. The market.
For about 10 years, Post said, the housing market has generally gone up and most valuations have followed suit. Now things are starting to level off. That means sales, and valuations, are all over the map.
“That’s the hazard of a sales-based system,” Post said.
Setting the price
Valuations are based on the sales of similar homes in the county. If your own home sold in the last year, there’s no problem — the appraiser knows exactly what the market thinks your house is worth. Otherwise, it’s time to start comparing. When did your house last sell and for how much? What have similar properties in similar condition sold for? When did they sell?
The hardest cases come when a house hasn’t sold for a long time and there aren’t many like it that have been on the market recently. Some of those may hold value or even go down a little, reflecting the lack of demand.
And one myth needs to be exploded. Valuation does not go up or down according to the needs of the city and county budgets — though some commissioners might wish otherwise.
“I don’t set market value,” Post said. “I try and reflect market value.”
In West View Terrace, market value can be pretty pricey. These homes are around a quarter of a million dollars in value, some a little lower, a couple substantially higher. Even a $10,000 change is fairly small percentage-wise — though, of course, it doesn’t seem that way on the tax bill.
At that level, there aren’t a lot of sales to go by. On the block as a whole, Post said, three homes sold, two of them for more than the county’s valuation. That’s pretty typical for Lyon County, Post said, where 7 of 10 homes sold in 2006 went for more than the county’s estimate.
“It’s easy to decipher when the market’s going up,” Post said. “But when it starts to flatten out, there’s a mix.”
And West View Terrace was as thoroughly mixed as any this year.
Sometimes I’m up ...
The biggest swing upward came from 2421 West View Terrace. That was the home that took a $10,800 bump upward for a total valuation of $236,000.
It may also have been the easiest home on the street to fix a value for. That home sold in 2006, Post said, and all he had to do was match the sales price.
“They made a decision that it was worth that amount of money and we reflected that action,” he said. That action, by the way, put the house at the largest square-footage value for the block — $144 per square foot in a neighborhood where the average is a little under $108.
At 1,638 square feet it’s one of the smaller houses in the neighborhood. That can have an impact, Post said, because economies of scale sometimes come into play for a larger house.
On the other hand, 2420 West View Terrace is one of the biggest houses on the street at 3,096 square feet and it went up by $8,100 to $278,800. But at its old value of $87.44 per square foot, it was substantially under the average county values, Post said, so the market was going to push that one up. Even at its new valuation, it comes to a little more than $90 a square foot, well below the rest of the area.
Three homes on the block — 2400, 2439 and 2440 — had an increase between $7,000 and $7,500. The house at 2400 is pretty standard for the block — 2,300 square feet in area and a B-minus quality rating. The last time it sold, it brought $80 a square foot. But that was in 2003.
“The 2003 sale is no longer in the mix,” Post said. Now, based on market estimates, it’s at $97.49. And even at that, only two houses on the street have a lower square-foot price.
One of those, 2439 West View Terrace, hadn’t had a sale since at least the mid-1980s, when the county began tracking the data. Based on other sales and the surrounding neighborhood, it seemed due for a slight increase. It bumped from $91.34 a square foot to $94.09, still below the neighborhood average.
The same applied to the last and biggest of those three homes, 2440 West View Terrace. A B-plus quality home with 2,900 square feet of living space and no finished basement, its value crept up from $97 to $99 per square foot. That adds up to a $7,500 bump in cash terms to $298,500, the second highest-valued home on the block.
“The numbers are substantial, but we’re talking a quarter-million dollar neighborhood,” Post said. “A $7,000 increase might be substantial in an $80,000 neighborhood but it barely wiggles the percentage meter here.”
That’s an accurate description for 2432 West Ridge Terrace, which got a $2,500 increase. The sales on the house are older ones — 1992, 1994 and 2003 — but the trend is distinctly upward. And again, when matched with comparable sales, there was enough for a slight hit, from $98.84 to $99.96 per square foot.
“It isn’t the same sales applied to every house,” Post said. “There’s going to be different influences on that particular property.”
...And sometimes
I’m down
Two homes on the street went in the other direction for much the same reason: a changing market and a correction for the rest of the neighborhood.
At 2401 West View Terrace, the valuation went down by $6,300, to $266,700. It sounds like a good deal, but it still leaves the home at $116 per square foot. In other words, it just moved a little closer to the neighborhood average.
The house at 2431 was the other one to go down, dropping by $3,900 to $232,000. That was a 2,300 square-foot building, a C-plus quality rating, and a home that hadn’t sold since 1986.
The last two homes on the street saw no change at all. The highest-valued home on the street, 2445 West View Terrace, remained at $302,300 while 2411 held steady at $231,900. The first home (which last sold in 1999) turned out to be right around the average for the neighborhood at nearly $108 per square foot. The other not only hadn’t sold since the at least the mid-1980s, Post said, but there also weren’t enough similar sales for a comparison.
“We didn’t have enough sales to push the property, so it stayed the same,” Post said of 2411 West View Terrace, which has a valuation of $231,900. “It worked out to $139 per square foot and I didn’t have that many houses that sold up in that price range.”
Fighting the price
Those who disagree with their valuation have until the end of the business day Monday to request an appeal. Just call the Lyon County Appraiser at 341-3302 and make an appointment. At the appointment, bring in any information that may help your case, such as other appraisals or details about the home that the county may not be aware of.
Post estimated that about 2 percent of residents appeal their valuation each year. Of those, he said, about half may see a small change in the total. The occasional large change is usually due to an error or typo.
Those who still don’t agree can ultimately take their case to the State Board of Tax Appeals. That’s rare — maybe three or four homes and three to four businesses a year from Lyon County take it that far, Post said. Because it’s a politically appointed board, its membership and attitude are somewhat unpredictable.
“There have been years when they rarely changed anything,” Post said. “And there have been years when they felt people deserved a reward for getting there.”