A revaluation of all commercial and residential real estate in Westbrook that could have dramatic effects on property taxes is set to begin in the middle of November.
Westbrook City Council approved a proposal on Monday for the services of Massachusetts-based Vision Appraisal Technology to perform the revaluation, which is slated to be completed at the end of June 2007 and cost the city $170,000.
The city mailed out requests for proposals to seven companies that perform that kind of work, but only one returned a proposal. Westbrook City Assessor Elizabeth Sawyer speculated that the other companies were either too busy or too small to perform Westbrook’s revaluation before the end of next June.
Vision Appraisal Technology, which has performed municipal revaluations for 20 years, will conduct analyses of both the commercial market and the residential market. The analyses will include developing new land, cost and sale values for commercial and residential properties, as well as individual field inspections of all Westbrook properties.
Of the cost of the revaluation, inspecting the residential properties will account for the majority of the $170,000. The city intends to pay $130,000 of the fee out of its 2007 budget, with the remaining $40,000 coming from its 2008 budget.
The effects of the revaluation could be significant for homeowners whose properties have been valued at significantly less than their market value since 1992, when the city’s property was last valued at 100 percent of its market value.
If the city has valued a home at or above its market value, the taxes on the property could decrease or remain about the same. If the city has valued the property below its market value, the property taxes would rise after the revaluation.
The city has performed several incremental updates since 1992, but not to the scale of this revaluation, and many in the city are expecting their property taxes to rise sharply.
According to Sawyer, the state requires municipalities to value properties in the community at the same percentage of market value. It also requires municipalities to perform revaluations frequently enough that the total property value in the community does not fall below 70 percent of the established market value.
The value Westbrook places on its total property is at about 60 percent of market value, said Sawyer.
The city performed a revaluation of commercial and industrial properties in 1999, and the administration expects that values will shift more dramatically in the residential sector because it’s been longer since a revaluation was done for residences.
City Administrator Jerre Bryant is expecting the overall tax burden to shift away from commercial properties and onto residential properties. In the last 14 years, residential real estate prices have risen more rapidly than commercial or industrial real estate, according to Bryant.
Sawyer believes, based on what other communities have experienced in revaluations, about one-third of properties will increase in value, about one-third will stay the same and one-third will decrease. She said a general trend is that newer homes tend to be valued higher than older homes, and thus see a decrease in property taxes after revaluation.
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