How to Cut Your Property Tax In New York - YouTube

Ok, good evening everybody.

What I want to review tonight is my own direct experience with real estate taxes and making

a change on my assessed valuation of my home.

So I am fortunate enough to own a home it happens to be in Westchester County, which

is in New York State, which is the highest real estate taxed county in the United States

of America.

Westchester County is #1 and Rockland County is #2 and I live in the Town of Pelham which

has 2 separate taxing authorities, the Town of Pelham and the Village of Pelham as well

as the school district, so I get big tax bills like everybody else and one day I received

this letter from the Village of Pelham.

I will read just the beginning of it.

You are hereby notified in accordance with the requirements of Section 510 of the Real

Property Tax Law, your tentative assessment.

2015, $620,000 and 2016, $635,000, so translation, they are increasing my assessed valuation

by $15,000 in one year, with no explanation of why.

I don't believe the value of my home went up $15000 last year.

So what do I do about it?

There's one line, further down the letter that says, "Grievance Day is Tuesday, June

21, 2016."

I got this letter probably in May.

So that begins my adventure.

I'm going to skip forward to the very end of the process.

As I record this it is September 16, 2016 and I received in the mail today a letter

from the Board of Assessment Review for the Town of Pelham and they have made a determination

that my assessed valuation of $635,000 has been reduced to $615,000.

So I got a $20,000 reduction by asking for it and in the next couple of minutes I'm going

to take you through how to do that, so that you can do it yourself, because you can do

it yourself.

I'm not a an attorney, I'm not an accountant, I'm a technology guy but I don't know much

about real estate and taxes.

So here is how you do it.

You go down to the Town of Pelham, 34 Fifth Avenue.

Every municipality has a Town Hall, and ask them for something called RP-524.

So that is the form that you need.

There are two pieces to it.

Hang on.

There is a 4 page instruction set.

And there's a 4 page form, which you fill out, by hand.

Straighforward.

Name.

Address.

At the bottom of the first page you tell them what you think your actual market valuation

should be.

Now, in the Town of Pelham assessed valuation and market valuation are one and the same,

so I don't believe that my home was worth the $635,000 so I said that I thought it was

worth $563,000.

They came back and said we don't agree but will lower it to $615,000.

So, here's the rest of this process.

What happened was that Tax Grievance Day, June 21 I made an appointment with the Board

of Assessment and you go in and you meet with the Board of Assessment and the assessor is

there as well.

It's like a deposition, they're up there on their dais and you are down at your table.

And you bring your application with you.

But you have some other information.

Which is, in advance of that meeting, I walked in to the assessors office and I asked for

a copy of the property tax card for my home so that I could make sure that what they were

assessing was accurate information.

That the lot size was accurate, that the number of bedrooms they think I have is accurate,

then number of bathrooms is accurate.

It was mostly accurate, but I learned some stuff which I'm going to come back to a little

bit later.

But for now, it was reasonably accurate on the tax card.

Step 1, get that tax card.

Step 2, you need what are called comps or comparable properties.

And the way you get comparable properties around here is, the Village of Pelham has

a web site and there's a link on there where you can access a database of comparable properties.

You type in your zip code, somehow I cant remember how, they identify you.

But anybody that owns a house can access this database.

Then you type in I have a 3 bedroom house and where it's located you the list of comparable

properties.

You dig around, you dig around you find properties that have very similar amount of land and

similar number of bedrooms , floors and attached to the RP-524 you show them these comparable

properties.

And, in fact, the web site allows you to print out a little table.

The web site lets you print out this table and that table really spells out the comparable

properties.

So for example my property had total assessment of $635,000 because they raised it and I had

comparable properties with some of them had even more land than I do and they were paying

less, or their assessed valuations were lower than mine.

Doesn't seem fair, I had one here for $598,000, one for $562,000.

So there are all kinds of reasons why properties are assessed at the levels that they are.

I'll save that for a different video, but here's the deal.

June 21 of every year or around that time there is a single day per year when you can

bring this completed RP524 to the Board of Assessment and say, "I would like a reduction

because..."

You make your case based on the comparable properties, and if you are fortunate, a few

weeks later you get a letter, or a few months later you get a letter and you get some kind

of a reduction.

If you don't like what they came back with there are still more things you can do.

You can hire an attorney and you can get a new appraisal of the home.

And that process I don't think is self-serve.

I think that requires going to court and the attorney will present a case to the judge

that your valuation is inappropriate not based only on comparables home sales, but also based

on the appraisal and an appraisal can cost $400 to $500.

So you have to be sure that you want to do that but the consequences can be very significant.

Just for the asking for doing a couple of hours of work with RP524 my assessed valuation

which is the basis on which real estate taxes are calculated was reduced by $20,000.

I don't know that might save me a few hundred dollars a year buy hey if it's a week of groceries

I'll take it.

If you go the route of getting an appraisal and an attorney it could mean hundreds and

hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars.

So, go out an do it get RP-524 ask for the tax card, find the comps online, staple it

all together sign it, bring it in and make your appointment next June.

Put it on your calendar now and get your taxes reduced.

Good luck.