From the Clark County News and Tribune:
Every six to 10 years Indiana has a statewide reassessment to update property values for property tax bills. We re-measure the characteristics of real property — square footage, building materials, home improvements and so forth. We apply new data on prices and costs to these characteristics. Since we waited so long between reassessments, we would update for six to 10 years of inflation all at once. Assessed values would jump.
Property taxes in 2013 will be based on new values from a statewide reassessment. What can we expect?
Let's first look at some past reassessments. In the reassessment for 1980 taxes, total assessed value grew 41 percent from the values used in 1979. In the 1990 reassessment the increase was 32 percent. Property price and cost inflation had been higher in the 1970s than in the 1980s. In 1996 assessed value rose 13 percent, a smaller increase because of lower inflation and the shorter time between reassessments. In 2003 assessed value jumped 52 percent, mostly due to the new market-value assessment rules.
But in the reassessment for 2013, assessed value may decrease.
The difference is trending. Every year since 2007 we've updated the prices and costs applied to the characteristics of real property, which is land and buildings. In effect, we've sliced up the big reassessment jump into small pieces that we apply each year. The new price data applied in 2013 will represent a change from trended 2012 prices, not from 2003 prices.
If values hadn't been trended upward enough, there still would have been uncounted inflation to make assessments jump. Trending has to be done right to eliminate the big increase. The early statewide results show real property assessments falling by about 1 percent. Trending seems to have measured between-reassessment price changes pretty well.
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See the full article here:
http://newsandtribune.com/columns/x1221096355/A-brand-new-world-for-Indiana-property-taxes
