The Real Deal

By Sharman Egan Lagniappe columnist

Getting full value

It’s been a good news/bad news week. The good news: the value of my house in Mobile has gone up 36 percent in the last year – to a little over $300,000, according to Marilyn Wood and the other nice folks at the Mobile County Revenue Commission. And it’s up an astounding 54 percent since we purchased just two years ago. Woo-eee!

The bad news: I’m not planning to go anywhere (so I can’t spend any of that windfall) and my property taxes will go up accordingly.

Now we all know my house hasn’t increased in value 36 percent in the last year. If you read my column regularly, you know I’m the Pollyanna of the Mobile real estate market. In my last column I pointed out that Mobile, unlike most of the rest of the country, still has a healthy real estate market. But, helloooo. There’s a big difference between “healthy” and 36 percent annual appreciation. This isn’t California in the 1990s.

Mobile isn’t a separate country (as the folks at Boeing would like everyone to think), and the effects of the recession haven’t passed us by. Like the rest of the U.S., we have higher gas and food prices, higher unemployment and an increase in foreclosures.

Take, for example, the house across the street from me. It sold last fall, mere moments before it was going into foreclosure. The sellers had owned the house for about a year. I don’t know what they paid for it but I’m told the mortgage balance was $379,000.

The new owners paid $241,000 for it last October, in something called a “short sale.” That’s where the mortgage holder agrees to a sale for less than the existing mortgage balance. So the mortgage company took it in the shorts, to the tune of over $130,000. No wonder banks are going out of business.

So let’s do the math here. The house directly across the street from me is worth $241,000. It’s similar to my house in style, age and condition. But it’s a lot bigger – in fact, it’s 49 percent bigger, according to the information on the Mobile County Revenue Commission site. And the lot is almost three times larger. Yet my house is worth 27 percent more than my neighbors paid for their house? I don’t think so.

Are you in the same boat, with a huge increase in your Mobile County property value? If so, the clock is ticking for you to file an appeal. Your deadline is probably around August 12 – check the little blue card Marilyn Wood sent you a few weeks ago. You have 30 days from the date on the card to file a protest.

The process is actually quite simple. It’s explained on the Revenue Commission web site at http://www.mobilecopropertytax.com/appealfmkt.htm. The site also has a form you can download and use to file your appeal.

Let’s just hope the process in Mobile County doesn’t turn into the same type of circus we’ve seen in Baldwin County. I’ve been through it twice now, and it wasn’t pretty. In fact, we received our Mobile County valuation notice less than a week after our hearing before the Baldwin County Board of Equalization for a property we own there.

We asked the Baldwin BOE to reduce our value by about $125,000, to a little less than we paid for the property in the good old days before Ivan and Katrina had the word Hurricane as a prefix. We based our argument on the fact that not a single property similar to ours – not one – sold during the entire tax year. I wanted to argue this indicated our property had no value whatsoever, but Kevin thought that was a little too aggressive.

I have a lot of respect for the BOE members. They aren’t bureaucrats; they just regular citizens like the rest of us. They have a thankless job at virtually no pay. We were encouraged when they nodded throughout Kevin’s presentation. Then, the day after our hearing, they sent us a notice with no adjustment. I’m wondering if anyone received an adjustment from the BOE. If you appealed to the BOE, I’d love to hear from you.

We’re thinking about taking our appeal to the next level, the circuit court. That process appears to be complex, expensive and shrouded in mystery. If anyone out there has been through it, please e-mail me at sharman@sharmanegan.com.

Now I know this isn’t a political column, but there’s one more thing bothering me about this whole property tax mess on both sides of the Bay. Why is it when real estate values go up (or the county decides they have), the city and county automatically get more of our money to play with? If the tax base goes up, the percentage we pay in taxes (the “millage rate”) should be adjusted down. If not, the gob-ment has increased our taxes – without so much as a public hearing. That decision, by the way, is made by our city council members and county commissioners, not by the Revenue Commissioner.

Sooo…anyone want to join me to throw some tea into Mobile Bay? Even if you’re not up for a full-blown Tea Party, you can still weigh in on the issue, if you vote in Mobile County. Revenue Commissioner Marilyn Wood will face challenger Renee Williams on Nov. 4. Of course, Baldwin Commissioner Phil Nix has already seen the writing on the wall. He isn’t running for re-election.

Sharman Egan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact her at Sharman@SharmanEgan.com.

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