East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current, June 01, 2016, Page 17E, Image 46

June 2016 // Real Estate & Home Builders Guide // 17E
Comparing cities by property tax payments can be problematic
By Ilyce Glink
and Samuel J. Tamkin
Tribune Content Agency
Q
: Property taxes on purchase will be a
factor for future quarters to come. Is
there a site where I can ind comparative
average town taxes? For example, Garield,
N.J., has signiicantly lower taxes than
Paterson, N.J., even though both towns
are about equal in population density,
schools, mass transit, blue collar, etc. I don’t
know how to go about inding out which
towns would give best bang for the buck,
translating that into lowest property taxes
paid per dollar of value.
: This is a good question without an
easy answer.
In general, and depending on where
you live, a number of different types of
payments get wrapped into your property
tax bill. You might pay a portion of the
amount to your local municipality to cover
the cost of government, the local police and
ireighters, water, sewer, garbage pickup
and other utilities. Another portion of the
payment goes to fund your local school
districts. And then another portion might
be sent to the state or, if you live in an
unincorporated community, the county.
A
Finding out the actual cost of your
property taxes is easy because it’s public
data. You can go to your local county
treasurer’s ofice or other tax collector’s site
(or the website) and look up the taxes paid
by the owners of any property. You might
be able to do this by address or pin number.
It’s harder to ind websites that scrape
this data nationwide and then serve it up
in an easy-to-use, interactive format that
allows you to compare county to county or,
better yet, zip code to zip code. Here are
some websites we found:
CNN Money has an interactive real
estate property tax feature that compares
the amount of property taxes paid in 3,000
counties nationwide. But it only covers 2007
to 2011.
The nonproit Tax Foundation has a map
that shows how much the average property
tax burden is by state and ranks states in
terms of how expensive the property taxes
are, but it doesn’t seem to have a calculator
that does the comparison you’re looking for.
Moving.com allows you to compare
two cities on a number of different metrics
but doesn’t include property taxes. Still,
you can compare home prices, school
districts, population demographics, income,
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ethnicities, education, climate, crime and
other factors.
The real problem with comparing cities
by property tax payments is that so much
of the data isn’t really usable when scaled
over a large area. Each home’s tax bill can
be appealed and, with the right amount of
homework, could be reduced somewhat. If
you buy an older home and renovate it you
might pay substantially less in property
taxes than if you bought a new home in
the same zip code. In our neighborhood,
541-934-2946 Office
541-519-6891 Cell
41909 Cupper Creek Rd.
Kimberly OR 97848
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the most expensive homes are taxed at an
overall lower rate than the least expensive
homes.
None of that makes any sense. Our best
advice is to ind a house you can afford in
the best neighborhood, with the best school
district, and public amenities. That house is
likely to go up in value faster than homes
in not such great school districts. While
you’d have a higher tax bill, our guess is
the overall increase in value will make that
bigger tax bill worthwhile.
Julie Mansfield Smith
Principal Broker/Owne r
cuppercreeklandco@gmail.com
cuppercreeklandcompany.com
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