Property assessment: your home is worth more, but…

Tomorrow: more on the appeals process and deadlines. 

Home values have gone up three times as much in Midtown as countywide, but some will pay the price.

Residential property values collectively went up 9 percent in Midtown in the last two years compared to less than 3 percent countywide, Jackson County officials say.

They will start mailing out assessment notices in the next two weeks. If tax rates stay the same, property taxes on a $200,000 house valued 9 percent higher will increase about $275 this year.

Ed Stoll, a deputy chief administrative officer with Jackson County, spoke about the numbers in a recent interview.

Using Midtown boundaries of 30^th to 55^th streets, State Line Road to Prospect Avenue, the area has 10,000 residential properties.

County appraisers inspected the exteriors of 5,200 of them and also used sales and market data to set rates, Stoll said.

The overall Midtown increase may be much higher than countywide because it has been some time since Midtown was thoroughly appraised, he said.

By law, appraisals must be done every odd numbered year but not all properties get inspected for each appraisal.

For the 2007 to 2009 period, Midtown residential values went down 6 percent. For 2009 to 2011, they went up 2 percent.

Midtown and Jackson County weathered the recession housing bust relatively well, said Curtis Koons, county assessment director.

“We didn’t see near the crash of other parts of the country,” he said.

The assessed value works with the tax rates set for taxing jurisdictions like school districts and others. The county itself gets only 7 percent of the property taxes and mostly acts as a pass through and collector.

The rates set for taxing jurisdictions for Midtown are projected to remain the same this year, but they are not officially set until the fall.

Assuming they stay the same, the taxes on a $200,000 home with a 9 percent increase would go from $3,050 to $3,325.

Overall, the housing markets are coming back, Koons said. Foreclosure sales are tapering off and they did not have a large impact on assessments anyway.

Officials base assessments on willing transactions and add money to data for foreclosure sales that do not reflect the normal market, he said.

Banks desperate to sell sometimes discount foreclosure property by a third.

“We would put that 30 percent back in there,” he said.