The tax bills aren’t even in the mail yet, but dozens of Weston residents are already preparing to apply for abatements.
Many of them are shocked – some even infuriated – by the property value reassessments that were recently done.
They argue that owners of smaller properties are being hit with steep hikes in assessments while owners of recently built mansions are seeing more moderate increases in their property values. Weston, like hundreds of other cities and towns, completed the 2002 assessments as part of the three-year revaluation certification process that is required by the Department of Revenue’s Division of Local Services.
“There is such inconsistency all over town of [people’s property] values going up and values going down,” said Phyllis Kominz, a Weston resident who along with her husband David has done extensive research on the recent assessments.
The Kominz home, which Phyllis Kominz describes as a bungalow with about 2,800 square feet of living space on a one-acre lot, was valued at $969,900. That’s 147 percent higher than the $391,900 assessment three years ago. The home is located within 25 feet of a neighboring property. The Kominzs argue that no one is going to offer them $1 million for their home because a builder would not be able to tear it down and build a larger home on the land as it is now.
But Weston’s assessor said the new assessments are based on sales that took place in 2000 and are the result of a hot real estate market that has seen the prices of for-sale homes in Weston surge. In recent years, Weston has seen an onslaught of “mansionization” – cases where buyers have opted to tear down existing homes and build large, luxury homes. That has further fueled escalating home and land prices.
In fact, the median price for a single-family home in Weston jumped more than 45 percent since 1997, the last year on which the previous Weston property assessments were based. The median price for a single-family home in 2000 was $814,000 compared to $559,000 in 1997, according to The Warren Group, parent company of Banker & Tradesman.
Weston residents aren’t alone in their frustrations. Other towns that have gone through revaluations this year, including nearby Concord, are facing similar issues.
Concord officials have received 500 applications for abatements, whereas in the past about 150 to 200 applications have been filed, according to an official in the town assessor’s office.
According to experts, part of the “sticker shock” and increase in abatement applications stems from whether communities update their assessments on a yearly basis instead of waiting for the mandatory three-year certification period.
Neither Concord nor Weston does annual interim adjustments.
“We recommend that [annual interim adjustments] as a way of making sure that towns have assessed properties at full and fair cash value,” said Joan Grourke, spokeswoman for the Department of Revenue.
The annual adjustments could mean fewer applications for abatements and also minimize the sticker shock that residents experience because they’ll have a chance to see their property values go up gradually year by year, according to Grourke.
The issue of whether communities should do interim adjustments has been debated numerous times. All communities have the option of updating their assessments to reflect the changes in the real estate market from the previous year. However, some town officials maintain they can’t because they don’t have the necessary resources.
Yet, the advent and widespread use of computerized appraisal systems and personal computers has made it less “cost prohibitive” and “labor intensive” to do annual adjustments, according to an article in the March issue of City & Town, a newsletter of the Division of Local Services.
Roughly 38 percent, or 83 out of 219 communities that reported information to the state, made annual interim adjustments as of fiscal year 2002, according to the same article.
The number of communities doing interim-year adjustments has gradually risen since 1998, according to the article, and communities that did interim adjustments in both years before a recertification year required significantly less percentage adjustments.
Newton is one of the communities that does annual adjustments. Like Weston and Concord, Newton went through a revaluation this year. But the city of Newton, with more than 80,000 residents, received fewer abatement applications than in previous revaluation years.
The city received fewer than 700 abatement applications this year, significantly less than the 1,700 applications filed in 1993, another revaluation year, according to Elizabeth Dromey, Newton’s director of assessment administration.
Dromey said the lower number of applications has to do with a number of things, including the fact that Newton officials try to keep residents informed about rising home prices through the town’s Web site and through mailings.
“It certainly does help to have annual adjustments,” she said, explaining that residents aren’t caught by surprise every three years.
Weston residents currently don’t have the benefit of annual adjustments, and the recent revaluations have confused many residents.
Value Judgments
Local Realtor Peter P. Casey said that in prior assessments, any land on a particular piece of property that was in excess of the amount of land required for new single-family home construction in that zone, which in most parts of Weston is one acre, was considered residual land was valued at 65 percent of the worth of its initial parcel. That changed with the current assessments, according to Casey, president of Prudential Wilmot Whitney Real Estate in Weston and president-elect of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.
“Under the new assessment model, that notion has been modified so that the fair value for land in town is for the first one acre, regardless of which zone it’s in. So the first acre gets full fair value. Anything in excess of that first acre is valued at 10 percent of fair value,” said Casey.
The consequence is that many longtime residents with small parcels of land and small homes, including residents like the Kominzs who live on Glen Road – one of the longest roads in the town with diverse housing stock – have seen their values rise tremendously.
To illustrate the disparity, Casey provided this example: The assessment for a 1,600-square-foot home built in the late 1800s on a one-acre lot on Highland Street went up 131 percent – from $391,000 to $902,500. The home abuts a 5,000-square-foot home with five bedrooms and five bathrooms built in 1996 on a 2.5-acre lot. The bigger home’s assessment went up a more modest 1.7 percent from $1.72 million to $1.75 million.
“Many of those folks … who have small parcels of land and small homes that are … generations old, have been caught in this perception, that the true value of a piece of land in Weston is the ability of a developer to come and tear down the old house and build a mansion,” he said.
The problem arises, however, because some of the parcels are considered nonconforming under current zoning rules and can’t be built on, according to locals.
“Although it certainly happens in Weston that properties are bought and houses are torn down, it’s considerably more difficult to do it when you’re starting out with a nonconforming lot,” said Casey.
However, because the “tear-down” assumption has been “applied presumably uniformly across the town, the value has been transferred,” he said.
“Those who own larger lots now pay less taxes on that land, or will pay less taxes on that land, simply because the land has been devalued by definition, and those who own one acre or less size lots will pick up that value,” Casey added.
Weston’s principal assessor disputes that assertion, however, saying that the formula used in the assessment process was not changed.
“We have not changed the methodology,” said Assessor Eric Josephson, who explained that some streets have been categorized into different indexes with higher property values.
Josephson said one acre of land was assessed at between $345,000 to $1.1 million, depending on the neighborhood or index category. Acreage beyond the first one acre was valued at $46,000. The town-wide average is $460,000 per acre.
During the last revaluation, an acre was valued at between $250,000 and $750,000 per acre, with any excess assessed at $30,000 per acre.
Josephson said the assessments were based on 140 sales recorded in 2000, with very few raw land sales included.
