The Iowa Department of Revenue has issued its property assessment "equalization" order designed to make sure property values are uniform across each of Iowa’s 99 counties.
Dale Hyman, head of the Department of Revenue’s property tax division, says if the state thought your county increased valuations too much — the order tells them to lower the assessment. But he says that’s a rare case. There are only one decrease for Crawford County, where residential assessments went down six percent.
Several counties will see no change in the evaluations they’ve already figured. The valuations are broken into three categories — agricultural, residential and commercial.
According to Hyman. farmland saw the biggest change — a 15.4 percent increase, "quite a bit more than it’s been recently," residential was up 7.5 percent and commercial valuations up 4.5 percent — similar to past trends.
Hyman says it’s easy to see why the agricultural property increased in value as assesments are based on productivity, so it’s a relfection of yields and prices.
Hyman says counties will now have to make the changes in assessments if they haven’t already. You may not have received an assessment notice in the spring, and if you get one now, you have until October to appeal the assessment.
Whatever the market value of your property ends up being, under the system you don’t pay taxes on 100-percent of the value. The state figures a "rollback" that takes some of the value off your assessment when you pay your taxes. Hyman says they’ll release the new rollback figure in November.