Dealing with an unpleasant surprise from the tax man
By MARY JO MELONE
Published August 24, 2003
There I was, the happy new homeowner.
It wasn't a big house. It wasn't a new house. None of that mattered.
It was my house. That's what mattered.
I unpacked my boxes. I hung pictures. I barefooted my way across the smooth wood floors.
This bliss proceeded for days. The bliss lasted for weeks, and the weeks became months.
Then came the letter in the mail - just one page from Hillsborough County, estimating the taxes on my piece of paradise.
The tax notice was enough to bring me to my knees.
All this time I thought Florida was a low tax state. They must have been talking about some other state.
Because my property taxes are about to go up 150 percent - from just more than $1,200 to just more than $3,000 - and there isn't a darn thing I can do.
My only consolation is that 7,000 other homeowners in Hillsborough County are in the same boat. They too buzzed the property appraiser in the past few weeks to complain.
All of us have this thing in common. In the past year, we bought houses from other people. When we did, the assessed value of our home - on which the tax levy is based - almost immediately jumped, in many cases to what we paid for the house.
Overnight, taxes skyrocketed.
This is the result of Save Our Homes, a constitutional amendment that took effect eight years ago. It was supposed to protect the elderly from sharp and crazy changes in the real estate market, so higher taxes wouldn't drive them out of their homes.
Under the amendment, as long as the house isn't sold, the assessed value can't go up more than 3 percent a year, or the change in the state's consumer price index, whichever is less. Tax increases remain accordingly low.
But no protection exists for the home buyer. The taxes on two similar homes, even in the same neighborhood, can end up wildly different, if one has been sold but not the other.
To compound the problem, most buyers don't know about this tax time bomb about to explode.
It would make sense for a real estate agent showing a house to give a heads up, prior to purchase, of what might be expected. A prospective buyer would have a better handle on what his house would cost, and whether he could really afford it.
But the appraisers on both sides of the bay say Realtors aren't doing so.
Disclosure "should be a matter of ethics," says Pinellas Property Appraiser Jim Smith. "If you don't tell people what their taxes are going to be, that's inherently wrong."
Don't blame us, replies Ann Guiberson, president and chief executive officer of the Pinellas Realtor Organization. She said she knows of agents who even put this disclosure in a special form.
The problem of Realtors holding up their end of the bargain in Tampa has been so great that appraisal officials have spent two years meeting with them, one after the other, to get them on board.
"It's rare that any (agent) admits ... that they're not fully and completely disclosing this information to buyers," says Rob Turner, Hillsborough's property appraiser.
Those 7,000 people who complained to him must have been hard of hearing.
Make that 7,001.
Here I am, faced with a bill that requires me to subsidize the tax bills of the elderly.
I feel my opposition rise and get squirmy. Who wants to be against tax breaks for people on fixed incomes?
A little fairness, that most impossible thing, is all I want. That, and full disclosure.
The Web sites for both the Hillsborough and Pinellas property appraisers contain information about Save Our Homes. But you have to know about the program before you can click your way there. In Tampa, the property appraiser will even give you a quote on roughly what your taxes will be as a result of Save Our Homes.
Again, you have to know to ask. And remember the truism, slightly reworked, that says, this is Florida. The buyer better beware.
