Grant County property values changing yearly

EPHRATA - Grant County property owners are receiving their first annual appraisal notices, following a state-mandated switch.

The change comes as part of a 2009 state law requiring counties to switch from evaluating property values every four years to evaluating property values every year by 2014.

The county is making the switch this year with the help of $387,000 from the state to purchase a new server and software, Assessor Laure Grammer said. The change makes it fair for people, since their home values could change within the year.

"Some markets are way down," she said. "People who I did a year, or two or three years ago, are still stuck way up here. That's not fair."

With the change, the assessors physically inspect each property every six years, and the remainder are being adjusted based on sales near the property, Grammer said. The inspections determine whether the information about the parcel is accurate. 

"It's shifted how work is done," she said. "So what happens is we spend a lot more time studying sales."

The properties are appraised using a combination of building cost data provided by Marshall and Swift, and sales in the neighborhood around the property.

"(The property) is in a certain area, say four square blocks around the courthouse," she said. "It's a different market than up on the hill, or a different market than Blue Lake. So all the sales in this area, I'm going to list all of those. And, I'm going to list the houses and what they were actually appraised at and what they sold for."

She compares the appraisal amounts to the sales amounts, and determine whether the value needs to decrease or rise, Grammer said. State law prevents her from using property sales later than Jan. 1, 2010 for the 2011 appraisals.

"They're always going to be two years behind," she said. "So even now, and the market is a little more depressed today then it was Jan. 1, but I can't use any of those sales. The thing people have to remember is if everybody is evaluated against that same date and time then it's a level playing field."

Whether property values are rising or falling, largely is depending on how much the property is valued at right now, Grammer said.

"If you get below $250,000, values are dropping a little, and the lower the value the more dramatic the drop in sales, but you get up above the $250,000 residential, they're still climbing," she said.

The total property value in Grant County has increased $480 million, including $1.6 billion in new construction, she said.

"If you take new construction out, I had an almost $1.2 billion decline (in value) across the county," Grammer said. "Most of that is because of our cycle is coming off of cyclical to annual. Properties that I did a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, when the markets were so high, they had to come down to what the markets are today."

Since the levy rate is tied to the total assessed value in the county, it is staying the same, she said.

"Taxing districts can't get more than 1 percent over what they got the previous year," Grammer said. "So budgets are just inching ahead ... Values might drop, but levy rates go up ... So I could literally reduce everybody's property values in the whole county by 50 percent (and) taxes would be exactly the same."

Grammer said annual property value changes started, but some of the additional services provided by TerraScan are delayed because of problems setting up the system. The program isn't new to the state, but the version the county bought was a new product.

"We were the first county to go to (the new version,) which was their new .NET release and it was filled with all kinds of bugs," she said. "Plus Grant County is the largest TerraScan county in Washington state, so the volume of parcels alone, 84,000 parcels, is larger than anything they had worked with before."