Bernalillo County property tax udpate for multifamily properties:

Earlier today, the Bernalillo County assessor announced that her office has sought and obtained approval to delay sending out notices of value for apartment buildings until June 15th, 2011.

This means the deadline to file a protest will be 30 days after that, or July 14th, 2011.

Single family and commercial property notice of values will be mailed out later this week with a deadline to file of May 30th, 2011.

As you know, last year was a tumultuous year for property taxes and apartments. Although our firm was able to obtain a significant reduction in apartment values, at the end of the day, this was done through strategy not a ruling from the formal tax board or the legal system. A legal ruling has yet to be made on whether apartments should have the same 3% cap as single family homes.

Those owners whose cases were not resolved are awaiting rulings from a handful of judges in district court. As was the case in previous years, it seems likely that one or two rulings will free up the balance of the pending litigation.

I would assume the assessor’s intent is to encourage one of the many judges to make a ruling prior to June 15th, 2011 deadline with the intent of using that ruling as direction for how to handle apartment values.

I believe this course of action is wise as it is going to take legislative, judicial or executive branch level action to correct the many property tax lightning issues.

Thanks,
Todd

It is property tax season

Notices of value are in the mail, or will soon be in the mail. If you need assitance this year with your property taxes – we offer a number of services for you, your firm and your client including:

We have an “app” for that
If you are trying to determining if your value is “fair”, consider downloading our 99 cent app from the iTunes store – http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/taxessor/id419811562?mt=8

Version 1 of the app takes the Bernalillo county resolved cases from 2010 and applies it to your property to help you determine what your value could have been. Because 2010 is a revaluation year, hopefully these values will go down. Version 2 of the app, which is awaiting approval of will automatically lookup your info from the county website and compare it to the potential value.

If you need some light reading, how about our 320 page textbook?
Now in its 5th edition, the text walks you through the property tax process including calculating your bill, determining if you should protest, and provides case studies of formal hearings and claim of refunds. Available in PDF format for $39 or printed for $49 at http://www.canteraconsultants.com/books

Property Tax Class – is on May 19th, 2011
This NMREC approved course is good for 8 CE credit hours and includes the above mentioned app and textbook and provides hands on training on how to handle your protest and covers our everything you need to “understand NM’s Property Tax System” – course registration for the 5/19/2011 course can be made at – http://www.canteraconsultants.com/registration

Representation
Finally, if that all sounds like a lot of work, you can hire our firm to represent you. We will analyze your property for free, and we charge you a small percentage of the savings only in the first year we obtain a reduction. Over the last 22 years, we’ve won 97% of our cases, representing over a billion dollars of commercial real estate with an average reduction of 23%. We charge 1/3 of what we save the client (i.e if we reduce their property tax bill by $10,000 then we charge $3,333) and we pay a 25% referral fee (on what we collect) to licensed agents, property managers or Realtors. If they choose to waive the referral fee, we can reduce our fee to 25% of the savings, and let the client know why they received a special discount.

If you have a property tax problem, look to us to be your solution.

A new form of advertising – your house

Thanks to Gizmodo.com for sharing from Adzookie.com which is a UK based company that is offering to pay homeowners mortgages if they let them paint their house with advertisements.

Although the Gizmodo posting indicates the advertisement is only in UK, when I went to their website it looks like they are up and running in the USA as well!