When Drew Armbruster received a notice that said the duplex he owns in the East Colfax neighborhood was valued at $280,000, he knew it wasn’t right.
In May, Armbruster and his wife, Susan, paid $144,000 for the rental property, located in a neighborhood that saw home-sale prices drop 2 percent from 2006.
“It was almost double what it should have been,” he said.
Armbruster went to the Denver assessor’s office to protest his assessment – and the higher taxes that would have gone with it. About three weeks ago, he received a notice that his property had been revalued at $165,000.
“I was actually pretty surprised,” he said.
Armbruster was one of about 12,000 people in Denver to protest his assessment this year. That’s more than double the number protesting in 2005. Metrowide, the number of people who protested their property values increased 39 percent. Only Adams and Weld counties saw declines in the number of protests.
Of those who protested in Denver, 2,405 – the bulk of them commercial-property owners – have taken it to the next step at the County Board of Equalization because the assessor’s office declined to change the value on their properties.
If the Board of Equalization doesn’t adjust the value, property owners can take their protest to the Board of Assessment Appeals, district court or binding arbitration. Because protests are still working their way through the process, it’s unclear how many people have been successful in getting their home values adjusted.
In Weld County, the number of protests dropped by 200 to 4,390 this year.
“We did lower values in some parts of Greeley because we saw our market coming down,” Weld County Assessor Christopher Woodruff said.
Still, the total value for Weld County is up 6 percent, largely because of the booming oil- and-gas industry.
In Adams County, the overall residential assessment increased 3 percent. The number of protests filed dropped 25 percent from 2005, largely because the assessor’s office paid close attention to sales verification, Assessor Gil Reyes said.
“The media was really playing up foreclosures, and everyone thought the sky was falling,” he said. “We really worked on getting everything as accurate as we could” to avoid an increase, he said.
Denver County Assessor Paul Jacobs blames media reports for the drastic increase in protests compared with the last assessment cycle.
“It’s the counterintuitive expectation,” he said. “People were reading stories about foreclosures and the housing market being off. But we were measuring in June 2006, and what the market was doing at that point in time was different than this year.”
By the time notices are mailed, the data are nearly a year old and don’t necessarily reflect current market conditions.
That means people in neighborhoods where home values have declined by more than 5 percent are probably paying too much in taxes, said Lon Welsh, managing broker of Your Castle Real Estate.
“The assessor isn’t keeping up, but it’s not like they’re not doing their job,” Welsh said. “They’re working with out-of- date data.”
It’s not unusual for the number of protests to increase when the market takes a dive, Arapahoe County Assessor Corbin Sakdol said. During this cycle, home values reached their peak right at the second- quarter 2006 appraisal date, well before property owners received their notices of valuation last spring.
In Arapahoe County, 4.4 percent of property owners protested their assessments this year, compared with 2.4 percent in 2005.
“When you go back in history, 4.4 percent is not a gigantic number compared to a lot of years,” Sakdol said.
In 1995, for example, 10.8 percent of property owners protested their assessments. The number dropped to 6.4 percent in 1997 and 4.7 percent in 1999.
The drastic increase in protests in Jefferson County is likely because of an active campaign to make sure people knew they could object, Assessor Jim Everson said. The number of protests increased 57 percent to 12,974.
“It wasn’t related to a big increase in value,” Everson said. “We did a lot of public relations to make sure people knew they had the right to appeal.”
Margaret Jackson: 303-954-1473 or mjackson@denverpost.com
