Huge increase in Property Taxes because of re-assessment.

[Mukul Patil]

In Williamson County, I am looking at a 55% increase in property taxes this year because my home was appraised that much higher by the county. Most investment homes in this area are seeing similar big increases in assessed values. To be fair, the value that the county has assessed is close to the actual market value, but still the big jump comes as a shock to me because historically the county's value had trailed the actual value by a large amount.

For people who have properties in Williamson County:
Does this year's (2022) increase seem highly unusual to you or is it just me?
Has anyone had any success in protesting the increase online at the wcad website?

[Greg Powers]

@Mukul Patil, taxes on property are a function of two factors—assessed value and tax rate. This may not be the case in your area, but depending on how well local government is run and which entity tax rates are set by (town, county, state), when there is a town-wide (or county-wide, etc.) reassessment and assessed values go up, sometimes the tax rate goes down to compensate.

Here in Manchester, NH when new assessed values were issued a few months ago they went up by 30-50%. You wouldn’t believe the howls of agony and revolution that ensued. What people didn’t pay much attention to was the fact that the tax rate was also reduced from about $28/thousand dollars of value to about $17/thousand. So while most people’s taxes went up, they did NOT go up by 30-50% on the whole. Some did; some actually went down. My own assessed value almost doubled, but my taxes went up by 10%.

Obviously if a town reassessed an individual property upon a sale, that’s different. But it sounds like you’re describing an area-wide reassessment. Check with the tax collector (not the assessor) and see if rates will also be changing.