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Falling home prices to cut some taxes
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More from County NewsClose to 35,000 homeowners in Ventura County will see their property taxes cut this year because of the declining value of their real estate, according to a summary of the 2008-09 tax roll released Thursday by county Assessor Dan Goodwin.
The total value of taxable property in the county was assessed at $106.85 billion as of Jan. 1, an increase of 3.2 percent over last year. Property owners will owe more than $1 billion in taxes, with bills mailed in October and due in installments in December and April.
That represents a significant slowdown in the growth of values and tax revenues, because the annual increases since the late 1990s have been from 6 percent to 12 percent, according to a statement from the Assessor's Office.
But a 3.2 percent increase is about what the county Board of Supervisors was expecting when it drew up the 2008-09 budget, so "the budget is safe," Goodwin said.
Because property values have been dropping for at least two years, the Assessor's Office reassessed every home purchased since 2004, so the taxable value could be reduced if necessary.
Of those 43,000 or so homes, 34,300 had their values reduced. The average value reduction was about $8,700, for an average drop of $904 in taxes.
Homeowners who have had their assessed values reduced will be notified in a round of letters that Goodwin's office will send out in mid-July.
There hasn't been any comparable drop in commercial property values, and the strength in commercial real estate has helped compensate for the soft residential market, Goodwin said.
Even in a residential market as bad as the current one, most properties tend to have gradually increasing assessed values. That's because California's Proposition 13 allows homes to be assessed only when they are sold or renovated and caps the annual increase in value at 2 percent. As a result, the assessed value lags years behind the market value of most homes and continues to rise slowly even if the market value drops.
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