| Author |
Message |
    
Octofoil
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 12:04 am: |     |
Nohero,
Nice work! Definitely supports the notion that some specific neighborhoods had appreciated more than others by '96 - '97.
The corollary is "why was there no revaluation at an earlier date", which would presumably have lessened the sticker shock. I believe the assessor's manual bases reassessment decisions entirely on aggregate, town-wide data (if I'm wrong on this, someone please correct me!). That is, the assessor has certain ratios, such as townwide assessed value/market value, coefficient of deviation and perhaps others, that he employs as indicators of whether or not a revaluation is warranted. Moreover, certain tolerance bands are also employed and some are mere guidlines. In other words, it appears that the assessor has a certain amount of leeway. More to the point, I don't recall from my reading of the assessor's manual at the library that neighborhood data plays a role at all.
If that is the case, then the assessor's aggregate data could still have reflected at least a marginal case for continuing to "skate" without a revaluation, even with a handful of specific neighborhoods appreciating faster than others. That is, until the dramatic run-up in 2000 produced an unequivocal case. And of course, as has been stated publicly by TC members, the township was beginning to lose too many assessment appeals.
Of course, all of the above is conjecture. One cannot know the above with certainty unless one has the data that the assessor used and replicates the appropriate methodology. It would really be interesting to review that material from some years back and leading up to the decision to re-assess! |
Lseltzer
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 7:25 am: | |
Nohero may have convinced Lydial, but there's still the issue of Dytunck's mystery proof. Let's hope it doesn't take as long to figure this out as Fermat's last theorum. |
Melidere
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 8:32 am: | |
true, true...
i'm just an unabashed fan of an open mind.
i think it's about the net because the net is the only place people will continue to pursue something like this until there is some sort of agreement.
irl (in real life) all parties would have dropped this topic ages ago in the name of politeness, and everyone would have continued to believe whatever they believed forever. |
Njjoseph
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 9:06 am: | |
Nohero, thanks!
Now, when you have 2 minutes (you're so much better at the statistical portions of Excel than I!), could you do a ratio of average price in 2000 / assessment, and then calculate that as a percentage of the 1996/1997 ratio? It would be interesting to see if the changes in prices between 1997 and now were widely different between certain neighborhoods.
Also, if you'd like to add to your above table at some point, the range of changes. There were years when I saw selling prices at 63% of assessment all the way up to 400% and one year there were many 500% and one 800%! |
Melidere
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 9:33 am: | |
Those numbers, njj...would probably show up if there were a 'tiering' of the data by type. In other words...if you took the bottom 30% of assessments in 1981 and compared them to the same houses in 1996, and took the top 30% of assessments in 1981 and compared them to the same houses in 1996, you would begin to illuminate some of the discrepancies you saw.
In fairness to lydial, her instincts are right...the higher end houses tend to spike higher..and the lower end houses are on a more level trajectory in a very heated market such as we witnessed last summer.
The thing is, in maplewood, the higher end houses and the lower end houses are spread out all over town due to it's history. Originally zoned for very large lots...you will find that on every block in the wide middle is one house much older than the rest. That's because the blocks...if i understand correctly...were orignally zoned for one house per block.
Later, those blocks were subdivided, and smaller houses, and more modern houses were built on much smaller lots.
Your house, for example...is on the site of the 'victory garden' during world war II. The hill you are on was undeveloped at that time, (again, if the stories i've been told are true). There are some unusually large houses further down the hill from you that were considered to be 'in the country' at one time.
The averages that nohero is using, although an excellent start, mask some of those trends.
Although the fundamental shifts took place long ago, i suspect that a tiered analysis would indicate that a 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom house on the west side of town took an unusually big jump in an overheated market on the west side...and did not appreciate at nearly the same rate in that same market on the east side.
They did manage to almost catch up in the last months before the reval, as your own purchase would suggest.
I do believe that the heat of the market created some exacerbation of existing trends, increasing the amount of the increase to some of the owners on 'the hill'. The only thing i've ever argued is that the BULK of the tax increases being imposed on those areas are the result of a trend that has been in place for a long time...and that a lot of homeowners, in a strict sense...have been overpaying their fair share for quite a while. I don't think that you can measure the amount of that overpayment by the reval. It's a lot smaller than the reval would suggest.
As the market cools...we need to redo this whole process. |
Melidere
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 9:42 am: | |
octo,
you ask an interesting question and it highlights a difference in perspective. My observations would indicate that most people understood that a reval was in order for a long time and that decisions were made NOT to do it, due to the other changes and dislocations taking place in the town.
At some point, the decision NOT to do it just became so glaringly counter-productive that the decision was made to go ahead. |
Dytunck
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 11:12 am: | |
lol, lseltzer
good one |
Nohero
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 2:10 pm: | |
NJJoseph suggested looking at the ratio of 2000 prices, to the assessments on those houses, and then comparing those to the '96-'97 numbers. A quick look at the database from Mr. Ryan shows that a lot of the properties with 2000 selling prices were assessed at less than those prices (For example, 15 out of 21 in AC01, 12 of 16 in AC02, etc.). So, those sales seem to have been "discounted" to some extent for purposes of the final reval. It does seem that the disparate increase in value among different sections of town continued to increase in the '98-'00 timeframe, as Octofoil noted.
And LSeltzer - with your programming skills, maybe you could help Dave put bigger margins on the message board, to accomodate other proofs (Sorry for continuing the reference to Fermat). |
Lseltzer
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 2:24 pm: | |
It looks like the tables always stretch to 100% of the width of the right frame. Any user can increase the size of the right frame by dragging the border between them to the left. |
Dave
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 2:39 pm: | |
Oddly, on my screen the table only goes about 3/4 width of the frame. Go figure. |
Nohero
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 2:40 pm: | |
Actually, I was just referring to what Fermat had written with respect to his "last theorem": "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain." Come to think of it, I think that was what Dytunck said, too ...  |
Dytunck
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 3:36 pm: | |
Nohero & Lseltzer:
It's not a table I'm having trouble with. I can manage those fine. It's rather a series of charts, or "graphs" that I can't seem to be able to post. You misunderstood when I said I couldn't post a chart. I still don't know how to paste in a graph. But I have several. This is just not the forum for it.
I did like Nohero's analysis. I'm very curious as to why when I performed the same exercise I got similar, yet different results. For example, in AC01, I came up with a ratio of 2.772 and in AC02, 3.111. (As a separate aside, CVI calculated the land values identically in AC01 and AC02. So the difference in appreciation must be in the structures. Make any sense?)
My study didn't compare sales to assessments in various parts of town, but rather actual sales in different sections of town in relation to each other over a period of time. Even if no one else finds this interesting, I just liked the exercise. I was surprised at the results.
Dytunck |
Octofoil
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 5:18 pm: | |
Dytunck,
I owe you an apology: had intended to e-mail a two-line bit of code to permit you save your xl graphs as "gif" files, thus making them very easy to post to the MOL board. Completely forgot-too many 80 hour weeks lately. Will do so tonite from home box (dont like to keep personal stuff on work laptop).
And would like very much to see your work. It sounds like something I've been intending to do, but my job keeps getting in the way! |
Nohero
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 5:30 pm: | |
Dytunck: I was just being facetious with the comment about the margins. Your message did make it clear that your review was contained on charts which were not as easily posted. However, if you are just going to look at how selling prices went up in recent years, that may not really help in considering how the reval could have caused large tax increases. The fact is that some parts of town (such as Hilton) saw some values go down in the mid-90's, from the "market high" of 1989-1990. So, just because some properties may have had similar increases in price in the mid to late 90's, this does not tell the whole story about their relative valuations.
Again, I think that the thing to keep in mind is that the differences in value did start to appear even before the recent sales activity.
As for your getting different results, I don't know if it's due to rounding, or something else, but the steps I followed were: first, compare the selling price to the old assessment, for each sale in 1996 and 1997; second, find the average of those ratios. |
Townie
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 10:57 pm: | |
Wow. I go away for a few days to earn money to pay my taxes, I come back and I'm amazed at how much has been made clear. Thanks, Nohero for all that hard work and thanks to everybody for braining out the question.
What's of most interest to me is what Nohero was getting at in some of his earlier posts: the change in tax liability, not the change in assessment.
What I was trying to say in my original post is that I know people living around Maplecrest Park who moved to Maplewood about the time I did, so I know what they paid for their houses. I paid more than twice as much for my house than they did, yet their taxes equaled at least 2/3 of mine, even closer to 3/4 of mine! How (and when) did that happen?
It seems to me what really matters to this issue of people having a sense that they were "overpaying" is not when selling prices for houses began to move apart, but whether some people's tax burden was high given their true property values.
I think Nohero was trying to get at that in his earlier posts -- at least trying to point out that these kinds of imbalances in taxation (where they seem out of whack with real property values) seem to have existed prior to the "bubble." Am I right Nohero? I don't want to put words in your mouth.
I'm really glad to see that there is something more than just anecdotal evidence available. When I offered mine, I didn't think it was more persuasive than anybody else's impressions, so that's why I asked if anybody could put real data out for everybody to look it. And I don't know if there is enough data to resolve all the issues going back to how the accuracy of assessments in 1981.
Ffof was right to question the accuracy of my report on Durand Road real estate, although I will point out that ever since I have moved here, houses in all sorts of condition have flown off the market in a day or two. The only exception is during the period around 1996 when there was a dispute about the schools in town. Once that was settled, the real estate market really took off around here.
Somebody asked if I would support the TC releasing data. Of course I would. And I'd be interested to hear the TC's explanation as to why it didn't do the reval sooner -- and other people's thoughts as to whether we'd be better or worse off had it been done sooner. My own feeling is that it's an impossible thing to know, because if taxes went up in the hills, it might have cooled the market (although South Orange, with its higher taxes, has also had a robust market these past few years it seems). Maybe, however, decreased taxes in other parts of town would have boosted sales there (presuming people would have seen decreases in 1996 or earlier, which I guess only would have happened if they had, in fact, been overpaying).
Dytunck is not the only one who gets tired typing. I hope, though, he's able to find a way to get his perspective up on the boards.
kathleen |
Townie
| | Posted on Wednesday, March 28, 2001 - 11:33 pm: | |
PS.: One possibility based on my anecdotal evidence is that my friends got a great deal on their houses while I overpaid for mine. What would be interesting is whether there is data that shows this kind of imbalance was common.
k. |
Nohero
| | Posted on Thursday, March 29, 2001 - 8:57 am: | |
Townie - You're not putting words in my mouth; I really do think that the imbalance existed long before the recent "bubble". I saw it myself when we moved in the mid-90's from a smaller house to a larger house here in town. |
Townie
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 1:42 pm: | |
Nohero,
That's interesting. I've been wondering for sometime if the 1981 assessments pegged houses in some neighborhoods above or below fair market value in order to "balance" the tax burden. Does your working with the data support such a theory or is that totally off the wall? Do you mind my asking what it was about moving from a smaller house to a larger one that indicated to you there was an imbalance?
k. |
Nohero
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 2:37 pm: | |
Townie - I have no idea if the imbalance was the result of a deliberate act in 1981, or if it developed later on. Practically speaking, it doesn't really matter, because it existed in 2000, \ a reval was needed.
As for your last question, we saw the same type of imbalance that you noted, when you wrote about comparing your tax bill with people who lived near Maplecrest - the percentage increase in the tax bill, from the old to the new home, was less than the percentage difference between the market values of the properties. |
Nakaille
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 2:49 pm: | |
Nohero, I imagine that if you noticed the difference then it was "noticeably different." (How's that for "duh" logic?) Do you know/remember about how much difference there was percentage-wise? Or, in thousands, what was the difference between would you have expected to pay based on your prior experience and what you were billed for? If you'd rather not get into the particulars, please ignore the questions. Thanks.
Bacata |
Nohero
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 4:20 pm: | |
I don't know how "noticeably different" it was, but it was something I noticed, from a quick comparison of the prices and the tax liabilities. I seem to recall that the taxes on the second house had seemed several hundred to a thousand less.
(And thanks for the produce recommendations on the other thread. There is still a produce market on Ferry Street, a few blocks from the train station.) |
Nakaille
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 6:03 pm: | |
Nohero: Thank you and you're welcome. And good night, Chet. And Johnboy, too.
Sorry, my fingers got a little out of control there.
Bacata |
Townie
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 7:20 pm: | |
Thanks for your response, Nohero!
kathleen |
Melidere
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 8:33 pm: | |
just a data point (anecdotal) on the possiblity of a 'deliberate' imbalance in 1981. I bought my house in 82 only a couple of thousand dollars above assessed value.
so the numbers looked to me, at the time..to be right on. |
Townie
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 9:43 pm: | |
Which part of town did you buy in? (Sorry if I missed other posts where you said.)
kathleen |
Melidere
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 9:44 pm: | |
sorry
i'm on elmwood.
we were deciding between the one we bought and a dutch colonial (read, kinda small) house on ridgewood, both in pretty bad shape.
the one on ridgewood cost about 20% more. |
Townie
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 10:28 pm: | |
So if you happened to notice (and remember!) the assessment on the house on Ridgewood also being "right on" with respect to fair market value, that would be more anecdotal evidence against some assessments around that time being lower than fair market, while others were at FMV.
K. |
Melidere
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 10:59 pm: | |
well
i don't remember the assessment...but when you look at the old assessments..and you look at the smaller houses on ridgewood...that's pretty much where they were.
anyone have the link handy to larry's maps? he has a map of the old assessed values up there somewhere.
you can see that the houses were a bit higher up there...but not the 2 and three times that they are now. |
Townie
| | Posted on Friday, March 30, 2001 - 11:16 pm: | |
Right. I think I get the picture. Everybody here has provided some missing pieces of the puzzle. Thanks!
k. |
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