Technology and Commercial Real Estate: Part 5 Technology and Property Taxes
By Bill Adams, President, MBA, CCIM, CRB, ALC
This is the fifth in a series of articles on how technology has changed the Commercial Real Estate (CRE) industry.
As we all know, property taxes on a commercial property can have a positive or negative effect on cashflow and thus the value of a property. Like many government services, access to property tax information has improved since the 1970s when I first got into the real estate profession. Fifty years ago, to get property tax information you usually made a trip to the local tax commissioner’s or tax assessors’ office. Sometimes, depending on the locale, you had to make a trip to the county courthouse for the county’s portion of the tax and then to city hall for the municipality’s part of the property tax bill. The information available about a specific property was limited. In the era of massive mainframe “punch card” computers, “high tech,” in some advanced jurisdictions, meant being able to use your landline telephone to ascertain the taxes on a property rather than making an in person visit.
Fast forward to today and, as you would expect, property tax information in most counties and cities is online. As an example, the website for the Fulton County, Georgia Tax Assessors office, which covers a substantial portion of the City of Atlanta, has multiple ways to search for tax information and a wealth of data about a specific property. You can search by an owner’s name, a property identification number and the property’s address. The results page on a search will tell you about recent transactions on the property and whether it is considered a residential or commercial property. You will also be able to determine if any building permits have been issued on the property.
The site will include the current tax valuation, its valuation history, and the size of the parcel of land. Images included on the results page include a sketch of the property’s boundaries plus an aerial photograph with the boundaries superimposed on the photo. One can find out if the current owner has appealed the tax assessor’s valuation of the property and a history of prior appeals. Lastly, there is a link to the Tax Commisssioner’s website where you can view the property’s most recent tax bill as well as tax bills from prior years.
An additional benefit of having so much property information online is that a property owner or a real estate broker can easily review the assessor’s data and uncover any mistakes that would affect the tax valuation of a property.
Finally, if an owner or a property tax consultant is appealing the tax valuation of a property, there is also a wealth of data on similar properties to use to make the case for an appeal.
Please let me know if you have any questions.