They say you can’t fight County Hall, but thousands of South Florida property owners are trying.With the steep slide in property values, the Miami-Dade Value Adjustment Board has been swamped with a record 70,000 appeals from property owners for 2008, compared with 51,571 a year earlier. In Broward County, the number of appeals to the VAB rose to 29,729 from 26,802 the prior year.
The boards can overrule the property appraiser, doling out big tax savings to property owners.
Special magistrates are currently working through a heavy calendar of hearings on 2008 property assessments, which are based on 2007 property values. Those tax bills were due March 31, but with so many appeals, the sessions will drag on well into the fall.
”Property owners are not happy with their property assessments,” says Robert Alfaro, manager of the Value Adjustment Board in Miami-Dade County. “Market values have come down, and they feel their properties shouldn’t be assessed at the levels they’re seeing.”
But a key point to remember is that property assessments aren’t based on today’s values; they look backward.
CHANGES IN VALUES
That means tax bills for 2008 reflected property values in 2007, before the market really went south. But 2009 assessments will be based on property values between Jan. 2, 2008, and Jan. 1, 2009 — a period when home prices really tanked.
”When 2009 assessments come out, it’s really going to be interesting,” says Gary Appel, who specializes in appeals for property owners.
During 2008, the median price for a single-family home fell 23 percent in Broward and 27 percent in Miami-Dade, according to the Florida Association of Realtors. Median condo prices plunged 29 percent in Broward and 12 percent in Miami-Dade last year.
Will county property assessments match those radical drops? Property owners will find out this summer. TRIM, or ”truth in millage,” notices of proposed taxes are mailed the last week of August.
Many property owners are counting on big cuts.
”They taxed everyone on artificially high numbers, inflated by liar loans and fake appraisals. Now they need to come back down to the real world and real values,” says Philip Logue, a Coral Gables real-estate investor who has appealed assessments on various properties.
Property owners sometimes save thousands of dollars by appealing to the VAB. For the 2007 tax year, for example, taxpayers got back $97.2 million through VAB appeals and shaved $4.81 billion from the taxable value of property in Miami-Dade County.
ADJUSTMENTS SOUGHT
”There are quite a few cases that warrant adjustments,” says Patrick J. Mikus, an appraiser who works as a magistrate in Miami-Dade.
Logue says appealing is worth the effort. This year, he has already won several reductions on Miami-Dade property.
A special master at the Value Adjustment Board, for instance, recently trimmed nearly $54,000 from the assessed value of his Coral Gables duplex at 5411-5431 Granada Blvd., reducing it to $676,000 and saving him $1,058 in taxes.
Logue hopes that his 2009 TRIM notice will more accurately reflect South Florida’s declining property values. ”I’m looking for the county on its own to lower assessments this year without me having to hire somebody [to appeal] to bring the values down,” he says.
One caveat about winning a VAB appeal: Property appraisers, relying on computer-assisted mass assessments, often jack up an assessed value again the next year after someone wins an appeal.
Fanny Behar Ostrow, who owns a rental property at 950 Viera Ave. in Coral Gables, won a reduction last year, shaving thousands of dollars from her tax bill. But the next tax bill raised the assessment again, ignoring the VAB’s action.
”I got like a $3,500 refund last year. Now the [assessed] value is right back up again, and I have to appeal again,” she says.
That helps keep the cottage industry of tax-appeal specialists in business. But now they have new clients: With home prices still falling, even many homeowners with homestead exemptions, which qualify them for a Save Our Homes cap on property-tax increases, are challenging their assessments.
Under Florida’s Save Our Homes amendment, assessed values on homestead properties can increase by only a maximum of 3 percent a year regardless of how much market values increase.
COUNTING ON THE CAP
That cap saved many long-time residents from hefty tax increases as prices spiraled higher during the boom. But now some property owners think their property values have slid beneath the cap mandated by Save Our Homes and have filed appeals.
For 2009 assessments, Broward County property appraiser Lori Parrish says she is finding many cases in which “the just value is dropping below the Save Our Homes value.”
