Appealing Your Claremont Assessment: The Process

An assessed value is an opinion produced by a large system, and large systems make mistakes. California gives owners a formal way to say so. Most owners never use it, partly because they do not know it exists and partly because the word appeal sounds like litigation. It is not. It is an administrative process with forms, dates and evidence, and it is navigable by an ordinary person who prepares.

This article covers the sequence, what the process is and is not for, and what actually persuades. It deepens the Claremont property tax guide. What causes an assessed value to change in the first place is in the reassessment triggers guide, and the document you will be arguing about is decoded in the tax bill guide.

Standing frame: this is general information from a real estate salesperson, not tax or legal advice. Filing periods, forms and procedures are set by the county and the state and they change. The Los Angeles County Assessor, the county assessment appeals board and your own CPA or attorney govern anything specific.

What an appeal is actually about

An appeal disputes the ASSESSED VALUE of the property. That is the whole subject. It is not the place to argue about the tax rate, which is set by law and by voters, and it is not the place to argue about a district charge levied by an agency other than the assessor.

That distinction saves people a lot of wasted effort. Under Proposition 13 the general levy is fixed at one percent of assessed value in the California Constitution and assessed value grows by no more than two percent a year absent a triggering event — so the only lever an owner has is the value itself. Voter-approved debt and non-value-based charges are somebody else's process entirely. Verify current rules with the Los Angeles County Assessor and your CPA.

The two situations that most often justify an appeal are a base year value an owner believes was set too high after a purchase or construction event, and a decline in market value below the current assessed value. They are different arguments with different consequences, and knowing which one you are making is the first real step.

The sequence

Read the notice. The assessor mails a notice of assessed value. It is the document that tells you what the roll says about your home, and it is the practical starting gun for everything that follows.

Try the informal route first. Before filing anything, contact the assessor's office and ask for a review. Many disagreements are resolved here, and some come down to a factual error the assessor can simply correct — a square footage that is wrong, a bedroom count that does not exist, a permit credited to the wrong parcel. Bring the correction, not the complaint.

File the formal application within the period. If the informal route does not resolve it, a formal application goes to the county assessment appeals board within a filing period the county publishes. THE DEADLINE IS THE WHOLE GAME. It is strict, it is not reopened for good reasons, and an owner who misses it waits for the next cycle. Confirm the current dates with the county directly rather than relying on a remembered version or a neighbor's account.

Prepare evidence. This is where appeals are won and lost, and it is covered below.

Attend the hearing. Appeals boards hear the owner and the assessor and reach a decision. It is a hearing, not a trial. Owners may represent themselves; many do.

Keep paying in the meantime. An open appeal does not suspend a tax bill. Pay what is billed while the appeal proceeds, because a delinquency creates its own separate problem, as the late taxes guide covers. If the appeal succeeds, adjustments follow.

What persuades

An appeal is a valuation argument, so it needs valuation evidence. Sincerity is not evidence. Neither is the size of the bill.

• Comparable sales near the valuation date the county uses, genuinely comparable in location, size, condition and character. In Claremont this takes care, because the housing stock is varied and a home two streets away can be a poor comparison.
• Documented condition issues that a mass appraisal would not have seen. Deferred maintenance, foundation or drainage problems, a functional flaw in the layout — with photographs, bids and reports rather than adjectives.
• Factual corrections to the assessor's record of the property. These are the most winnable arguments of all because they are objective.
• The purchase itself where a base year value is disputed, particularly where the transaction had characteristics that make the price an imperfect measure of market value.

What does not persuade: a neighbor pays less, the bill went up more than expected, or the owner disagrees with public spending. The first of those is usually explained by Proposition 13 base years rather than by any error, which is the subject of the Prop 13 guide.

Whether it is worth doing

Be honest about the arithmetic before you begin. An appeal costs time and possibly the cost of professional help. A small correction to an assessed value produces a correspondingly small change to a bill. A large correction is worth real effort, and it also persists — a corrected base year value carries forward.

Also be honest about the risk. An appeal invites a review of the property's value, and a review can look at facts you had not raised, including unpermitted work or improvements the roll never captured. That is not an argument against appealing a genuinely wrong value. It is an argument for knowing your own property before you invite scrutiny of it.

Where a case is substantial or the property is unusual, get help. A qualified property tax agent, a tax attorney or an appraiser who works on assessment matters brings evidence in the form the board expects, and the cost is often justified where the value at stake is large.

Before you start

Get the current filing period, form and procedure from the county. Ask the assessor first, informally. Assemble evidence rather than argument. Keep paying the bill. And treat everything here as orientation rather than instruction, because the rules that govern your appeal are the county's and the state's, not this article's.

The wider system in plain language is the owner's guide.

Anthony Grynchal has been licensed in California since November 2009. This is general information, not tax or legal advice; the Los Angeles County Assessor, the assessment appeals board and a qualified professional govern your case.