How can a 5% property increase reflect a very downward slide of the value of everything? I bet our property did not increase in value 5% - they just need more taxes.
This is just a way for the city council and planners to sit back and brag that WE DID NOT raise your taxes.Any time the city wants more money the will get it one way or the other.This is nothing but a TAX INCREASE.
Thanks to city council fot the 5th STREET PROJECT the money had to come from somewhere.I wonder what PROJECT they will come up with next to SPEND MONEY THEY DO NOT HAVE.
The statement that the Lynchburg market is insulated from the country's downward real estate trends is either disingenuous or naïve. Any man who truly believes this should try to sell his much more valuable property and see how it goes. In past years, homes in my neighborhood would sell within hours, if they even made it to a listing at all. Since the second half of last year, not a single home for sale in my neighborhood has sold. Many owners have taken their homes off the market because there are no buyers – even after a long series of price reductions. No buyers does not mean homes are worthless, but if there have been houses for sale in a neighborhood for the last 6-8 months but there have been NO sales how can the value be increasing?
This reassessment is wholly unsupported by logic and reminds me of a senator’s laughable “Black Monday” comment, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.” Anyone can say anything, but uttering it does not make it true. Lynchburg City Council, as representatives of your fellow citizens, please stop this valuation/tax increase NOW.
If reassessed values are based on actual home sales in our neighborhoods, what is the assessment formula for properties that have actually sold over the past year? Shouldn’t this formula be fairly straightforward? Wouldn’t the value of a property be the sales price minus realtors’ commissions (which are padded into sales price and paid by the buyers but surely do not add value to the property) and sales taxes (lest we be taxed on our taxes).
I will not even comment on homes that have not sold or homes that are for sale for which there are no buyers. In my neighborhood, homes that sold last year are now facing what is best described as random reassessments. Values claimed by the City Assessor include the full dollar amount of the sale transactions, including (the up to 7%) commissions paid to realtors by the buyers. (The amount of a commission is easily accessed and I am sure buyers would happily supply this information to the city so the amount can be deducted from their new property’s “value.”) Nonetheless, even with the absurd policy of adding in the expense of the realtors, proposed property values for homes actually sold in my neighborhood range from 99% to 93% of the actual sales price. This alone points to a serious systemic problem with inconsistent tax rates and the over-taxing of Lynchburg residents.
mr daniels is using bogus figures . on my assessment he list houses that go back to 2007 . the housing bubble did not burst until sometime after 2007 all the houses that have been sold in the last year in my neigherhood have been drastically reduced. i think if he checks with the realtors he will find that home values have gone down in the past year
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