If you're a homeowner, you may have received an official-looking letter recently informing you that your property needs to be reassessed for tax purposes. The cost of the reassessment is $179, but you'll have to pay an additional $30 if you don't mail in your application within the next few weeks.
"It's a scam," Los Angeles County Assessor Rick Auerbach told me. "They're trying to make you think the letter comes from my office so you'll pay them to do something you could do yourself for free."
The letter is actually from a company called Property Tax Reassessment, which gives a Los Angeles post office box as its address. Auerbach said the company's letters have prompted a raft of complaints from homeowners to his office and to other assessors statewide.
"This outfit is particularly disturbing because they seem to be sending their notices to everyone," said Larry Stone, Santa Clara County's assessor in Northern California. "The letters are terribly deceiving."
I'll get back to Property Tax Reassessment in a moment. First, it's worth asking whether companies like this actually offer some value to homeowners at a time when property values are down by double digits in most areas.
Auerbach and other California assessors say no. They say they routinely reappraise people's homes, whether they're asked to or not.
In L.A. County, roughly 318,000 single-family houses and condos were given a second look last year, Auerbach said, and 128,000 of that number had their assessed values reduced by an average $73,000. That represented an average tax savings per home of about $750.
But you have to wonder: What incentive do county assessors actually have to lower people's tax obligations, especially with cash-strapped local governments all but begging for spare change from state and federal authorities?
"The incentive is that I and my staff have to do what the law requires us to do," answered Auerbach. "The job of the assessor is to put the right value on properties."
Even so, more than 78,000 California homeowners felt they'd been shortchanged by the assessor's office last year and requested additional appraisals.
Of that number, Auerbach said, about 35,000 did indeed merit lower property values, with the average reduction running $93,000.
