Sam Gurwitt Photo
A house in West Woods with significantly fewer trees than before.
Hamden residents should soon find surveys in their mailboxes asking a host of questions about their properties. Those mailers, to be sent out in the new few months, will help determine their next property assessment.
In an interview on WNHH FM’s “Dateline Hamden” program, town Assessor John Gelati discussed the process of assessing properties in a geographically and economically diverse town like Hamden.
Properties are supposed to be reassessed every five years in Hamden. Gelati is currently preparing for the 2020 revaluation, which will determine tax bills for the summer of 2021. Hamden’s grand list currently contains $3.9 billion worth of taxable properties.
He’s been in the news recently because of a number of assessment-related community discussions.
In May, he held an information session with residents of the West Woods neighborhood who wanted to know whether their property assessments would decrease to reflect the tree damage from the May, 2018 tornado.
Last month, he attended a meeting with residents of “Neighborhood 40,” an area of southern Hamden that saw its property values increase disproportionately after the 2015 revaluation.
Gelati said Tuesday he has already begun analyzing the effect storm damage has had on property values in Hamden. He said the town will go out to bid for a revaluation contractor in the next month or so. In 2015, the town hired Vision Government Solutions for the revaluation, and used its software. Hamden recently purchased new software from eQuality Valuation Services, which the next contractor will use for the 2020 revaluation.
The revaluation will begin in earnest with a data mailer, he said, which should come out near the end of 2019 or at the beginning of 2020.
Residents “will receive a data mailer, and that will have information about the property, and will ask them to review it and to make corrections if necessary,” he said. It will ask residents to report basic statistics on their properties, like how many bathrooms and bedrooms their houses have and the property dimensions.
John Gelati at WNHH FM.
The revaluation company will then review the data collected from the mailer and edit it if need be.
It will use data on property sales leading up to Oct. 1, 2020, and other factors, to generate new recommendations for assessment values.
Revaluations, he said, have to have a date that marks the end of the period used for market analysis. Though sales after that date do not factor in the actual analysis, “certainly sales that occur after are looked at,” he said, in order to make sure the assessments the revaluation software generates are reasonable.
Gelati said he also anticipates that this revaluation will use a flyover, where “a plane photographs all the real estate” in Hamden. Technology allows appraisal companies to compare the dimensions of a building from the photographs with the dimensions in plans. The flyover photographs can also be a valuable tool, he said, for the town’s public safety departments.
Once the revaluation contractor has generated its assessment recommendations, it’s Gelati’s job to review and approve them, and residents’ job, if need be, to appeal them.
“After the analysis is conducted and preliminary values are proposed, the public will receive that information and they will have an opportunity to start the cycle of an informal hearing if they wish,” he said. Residents will likely receive the results of the revaluation analysis at the end of 2020.
The revaluation process, Gelati said, “requires the engagement of the homeowner,… particularly where it comes to quality control, where their first is a verification of information, and then after analysis and a proposed value, they have an opportunity to attend informal hearings and as a result, if they’re not satisfied with their value, to attend an appeal process.” They can appeal their assessments to the town’s Board of Assessment Appeals, and if they decide it’s necessary, begin litigation thereafter.
Gelati himself will not conduct the actual revaluation analysis and generate new proposed assessment values; that’s the job of the revaluation contractor, though Gelati does hold a license to do so. However, he ultimately has to accept their recommendations.
“It is the assessor’s position to accept the revaluation recommendations or not, so in the end… the assessor absolutely has a say,” he said.
“I will be able to discern from their conclusions and the process of whether I think that all of the standards which are required in the revaluation process — required by the state as well — are being met,” he said. And sometimes that means using experience and common sense to determine whether an assessment is reasonable.
“I don’t really have any expectation of what a value should be,” he said, “but I can certainly understand if a value seems reasonable or unreasonable.”
Gelati at an information session in West Woods in May.
Assessments, he said, need to make sense not only in relation to the assessments of similar properties. “It has to make sense throughout the town. So a property on one street makes sense to a property on another street, makes sense to a property on another street,” he said.
If Gelati decides that something looks odd, he said, he would want to examine the analysis that generated the value, and conduct further analysis and maybe get a second opinion. Any new information could constitute grounds for a change.
In the 2020 revaluation, he said, he will make equity a priority. “A very important goal of the upcoming revaluation in 2020 will be to be certain that all of the neighborhoods are fair and equitably valued.”
Not to open a can of worms, but I think New Haven should consider voluntarily doing its revaluation early. Tom Breen's series of articles has documented that large apartment complexes and developable parcels are selling for well over their current appraised value, while the sales price of other properties generally reflect their appraised value. If these data are representative, doing revaluation early could allow the city to reduce its tax rate. Perhaps this could entice some people to move from Hamden to New Haven for the lower taxes! (Full disclosure, I am a New Haven homeowner.)