Attention Blount Co. property owners

Submitted by R. Neal on Fri, 2006/05/26 - 3:08pm.

Blount Co. reappraised property values this year. Property owners recently received notice of reappraisals. If you are a property owner in Blount Co. or any other Tennessee county that was reappraised this year, you should check your reappraisal notice carefully.

Ours seemed out of whack, so we ran some comps to confirm and went down to the temporary appraiser's review office at Midland Shopping Center to discuss it. We came armed with a lot of paperwork. The guy who helped us said "Y'all know more than you are supposed to. We like that. Helps us catch mistakes."

We were lucky, and just happened to get the appraiser who appraised our house. He noticed right away that there was indeed a mistake (a "keypunch error" he called it), said it was his error and he was sorry, and that he'd fix it and we'd get a corrected notice in a few weeks.

He told us that the Blount Co. average appraisal was up about 30% since the last county-wide appraisal in 2001. Some neighborhoods and areas will be lower or higher depending on market conditions, etc. But if your reappraisal went up significantly more than that, you might want to go talk to them about it.

They are human and they do make mistakes. (We thought it was because we were the only Democrats on our street.) They are also quite reasonable, and most helpful.

( categories: )


S Carpenter's picture
Up and to what effect

 

My folks live in North Blount Co. Their property, mostly agricultural, seems to be up by a third, at least.

Will the rate now adjust down so there is a zero net revenue gain for the County? It seems like that's the Knox Co. policy.

If that's so, I've always wondered, why make the upward reappraisals? Perhaps to create equity between depressed and booming areas?

R. Neal's picture
Will the rate now adjust

Will the rate now adjust down so there is a zero net revenue gain for the County? It seems like that's the Knox Co. policy.

That's how it's supposed to work under state law, anyway (with the exlusion of new construction). And the state has declared a lower "certified rate" for Blount Co. that takes that into account. Although there appears to be an exception based on "budgetary needs" or something, and in that case there is supposed to be a public hearing.

If that's so, I've always wondered, why make the upward reappraisals? Perhaps to create equity between depressed and booming areas?

I think the idea is to have appraisals reflect true market/replacement cost, for good or ill, with the expectation that appreciation will increase tax revenues overall in future years when they raise property tax rates.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.

More information about formatting options

Captcha
This question is used to make sure you are a human visitor and to prevent spam submissions.
Copy the characters (respecting upper/lower case) from the image.