Property Taxes - Board of Revisions - Cleveland

[Matt Rutter]

Our rental property has 2 complaints filed against it by Cleveland Metropolitan School District for 2018 and 2019 and we have an initial hearing at the end of the month. What is the best way to navigate this hearing?

A little background: We received 2 back-to-back notices from the Cuyahoga County Board of Revisions that a complaint was filed against our rental property for years 2018 and 2019 by the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. It seems a little egregious that they are doing this so far back and every year outside of the county's assessments every 3 years.

The Cleveland Metropolitan School District filed a similar complaint with the previous owner in 2017 and they settled on a value of $218,400.

We purchased the property in 2018 for $345,000 and Cleveland Metropolitan School District's opinion is the property is worth market value for what it sold for. The reason we are receiving one hearing for both complaints is because they are so behind in general and then COVID hit that they are just getting to these now.

We need to submit our evidence 7 days in advance of the hearing and I've heard the best course of action is stick to the facts, and later appeal if needed. Some evidence I was planning to submit and talk to for the hearing are:
- Independent appraisals that were certified by the State of Ohio were conducted at the beginning of 2018 support this Market Value as $218,400.
- Comparable Property Values for similar quadruplexes that have sold between 2018 - 2019 in the surrounding area are right within line of the previous Market Value of $218,400 and have remained consistent year-to-date.
- We overpaid for this property with what we believed the long-term value of what the property should be valued at in 10-15 years rather than what it currently was.
- We also conducted a home inspection when purchasing the property that lists interior and exterior photos, as well as a detailed list of everything that was currently degrading the value of the property, including several structural issues that would need to be addressed in order to get the property to market value that we were going to submit as evidence as well.

If anyone has any experience or other thoughts that would help us reduce this tax increase we would love to hear an input.

[Andrew Weiner]

There are attorneys in the city that specialize in these cases.  Depending on how much money you are looking at in taxes you might want to engage one of them, they get paid as a percentage of what they save you.  Other than that I don't think that you have such a strong leg to stand on when you have a recent purchase, you could argue that the increased taxes actually lower the value of the property.