We just spoke with a homeowner about improvements made and how they can change values. The home was built over 70 years ago and recently had an addition put on along with some new siding, to much surprise of the homeowner the assessed value jumped 80% and you can imagine what this did to their tax bill. This was a huge error by the assessing official and although these types of mistakes are not common, the only thing that alerted the homeowner was a huge spike in their tax bill. Imagine how difficult it is to detect these errors if you already feel the pain of yearly tax increases. A 1 or 2% increase has become the norm for many of our property tax bills and we just assume the tax rate increased once again. Over a period of 10 years, this could amount to a 10-20% error and now factor in an inaccurate depreciation level and you could have an assessed value that is off by 30% or more. A small error over time will add up to a large amount. I don’t know about you, but a 30% reduction in a tax bill would be very welcome.