Property owners who think their tax assessments should be reduced amid falling real estate prices should wait before hiring a company to help them win a reduction, Ventura County Assessor Dan Goodwin said Friday.

That's because their homes may be among 8,622 whose assessed value has been cut under a program that Goodwin's staff launched this year in response to the real estate downturn.

The reductions which will save affected homeowners an average of $500 each on their next property tax bills are scheduled to be mailed in mid-July.

Homeowners should wait until then, Goodwin said, before responding to mailed sales pitches from at least two companies saying that, for a fee, they can help get assessments reduced.

Property taxes are computed based on what the Assessor's Office says a property is worth. Goodwin said his office's program is a proactive attempt to react to the market slowdown and be fair.

The reductions will lop off about $400 million in valuation from the county's assessment roll, which is to be announced in early July, Goodwin said. Since 1998, total assessments have increased nearly 100 percent, from $47.9 billion in 1998 to $95.8 billion last year. Goodwin noted that the value of many homes has increased much more than 100 percent over that period.

"What this is really about is the good government thing of giving people a fair tax bill, not one that is excessive," Goodwin said. "The other big issue is I didn't want to wait for thousands of people to have to call me and say, Didn't you notice? The market went down.'"

12,000 letters sent

Robert Jones, managing director of Escondido-based Property Tax Appeal Services LLC, which pitched its program recently in letters sent to 12,000 homeowners in Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, San Diego, San Bernardino and Riverside counties, said he has already won assessment reductions for some of his customers, ranging from 6 percent to 18 percent.

His company, which charges a $100 retainer and 25 percent of any savings it obtains for a taxpayer, uses a statewide real estate records database and many of the same comparable sales criteria appraisers use to determine a home's value.

"Our point is to prove that the value has in fact fallen from when that person bought the house," Jones said. "The assessor's job is to prove that it hasn't lost value since it was bought."

The Assessor's Office tracks the value of some 300,000 properties in Ventura County, including about 150,000 condominium and single-family-home residences. The others are mobile homes, farms, commercial-industrial properties, boats, airplanes and business inventories and equipment.

In a typical year, Goodwin said, his staff reassesses about 30,000 properties, primarily those that have changed hands or undergone construction, ranging from room additions and remodeling projects to new buildings.

Price peak, then slide

This year, the office looked at about 18,000 additional residences, mostly those that changed hands from July 2005 to the end of last year, the period when prices peaked and then began sliding.

"Those properties generally fall into the range of ones that might have an assessment posted that would be over their market value," said Goodwin. "We broke that down by areas of the county because some areas were stronger than others because of scarcity and other issues. Typically, condos were disproportionately high in terms of properties that had declined in value."

The median price for new and existing homes and condominiums during that 18-month window started at $579,000, peaked at $634,000 and ended at $593,000, according to DataQuick Information Systems. The La Jolla-based marketing firm reported this week that the median for May was $590,000, a 1.6 percent decline from the same month last year.

Commercial and industrial properties were not studied because their values mostly have not declined, Goodwin said. Neither were residences purchased for below-market prices in subsidized housing programs.

His staff did full appraisals on 15,225 properties, including about 5,200 condominiums, 10,450 subdivision homes and 2,400 custom homes, Goodwin said. The values are as of Jan. 1, under law the assessment date for all properties for the 2007-08 year.

Other assessment options

Goodwin said appraisers also considered reducing assessments for all properties by a percentage equalling the overall decline in real estate prices, but that would have resulted in over-assessing some properties and under-assessing others.

Other counties are handling the problem that way, he said.

Goodwin said he has seen mailed pitches urging property owners to pay for help to get lower assessments from two companies, but he could only identify Property Tax Appeal Services. He emphasized that the mailers are not illegal.

Voters approved a law in 1979 allowing a property owner to file a form asking for a one-year lower assessment rather than filing a formal appeal. Homeowners who want to appeal for a lower assessment have until November.

Property Tax Appeal Services sometimes cannot come up with evidence that a reduction is needed, said Jones, the managing director.

"Some places don't even go down in value," he said. "If you own a home on a bluff in La Jolla, it hasn't gone down in value. They always seem to go up there."

His company will seek reductions only for properties purchased at the peak of the real estate boom. While most homes purchased earlier have probably lost some value, Jones said, they are almost certainly still worth more then when they were acquired.

On the Net:

http://assessor.countyof ventura.org/