Re: 2010 worst year for home sales since 1997

On Jan 20, 2011, at 11:16 PM, Peter T. Chattaway wrote:

> On Thu, 20 Jan 2011, Lance McLain wrote:
>> Just curious, but how do your property taxes work there?  Is there  
>> an annual reassessment, are there increase caps?
>
> I have no idea what an "increase cap" is,

In Maryland they had a maximum amount they could increase your tax  
bill (a cap) each year.  Usually between 2 and 5%.  Where I lived it  
was 5%.  This means if the value of your home went up 25%, you only  
had to pay the tax on 5% increase taxable value.  During the bubble  
years your home may have doubled in value but you were paying the  
property tax of a much smaller house.  But it had the unfortunate  
effect of when property values went back down, the taxes continued to  
go up because you were still getting 5% increases for the taxable  
value to reach the assessment value that had inflated over the years.   
So assessments may have went down 20% but you still got a 5% increase  
in your tax bill.

> but yeah, we get property assessments every year, usually the first  
> week of January or thenabouts. For three years, we got *two*  
> assessments -- one for the apartment we live in, and one for the  
> apartment we were renting out -- but since we sold the latter  
> apartment last summer, we got just the one assessment this year.

Wow...we got an assessment once every 3 years which was used for each  
year.  Unless the property changed ownership, at which case there was  
a new assessment and the caps lifted and the taxable value returned to  
100% of assessed value.

regards,
-Lance


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