Why price per square foot
You cannot compare your house to a sale directly, because no two houses are the same size. Dividing by square footage puts both on the same footing, and that is exactly what an assessor's own mass-appraisal model does.
So a $412,000 assessment on 2,150 square feet is $191.63 a square foot. A house nearby that sold for $358,000 on 2,040 square feet went for $175.49 a square foot. Your figure is 9.2% higher than what the market actually paid, which is the beginning of an argument.
The other way of saying the same thing is often more persuasive. At the sale's rate, your 2,150 square feet would be worth about $377,300 — some $34,700 below where the assessor has you. That is the number the reduction would be measured against.
One sale is a check, not a case
This page answers a screening question: is there something here worth an afternoon? It does not build an appeal.
Assessment boards expect three to five recent sales of genuinely similar properties, because a single sale can be a distressed one, a sale between relatives, or a house with a problem that is not visible in the record. One low comparable is easy to dismiss as an outlier. Four of them, pointing the same way, are not.
The full appeal calculator takes five comparables, flags the ones a board is likely to reject, converts the gap into money over the years the reduction holds, and shows whether a contingency firm keeping a third of the saving leaves you better off than filing yourself.
What makes a sale comparable
- Recent. Within about a year of the assessment date, and on the correct side of it. A sale after the valuation date carries little weight.
- Close by. Same neighbourhood, ideally the same school attendance area. Crossing a boundary can move value more than crossing a street.
- Similar size. Within roughly 20% of your square footage. Price per square foot drifts upwards as houses get smaller, so a much smaller comparable flatters your case unfairly and a board will say so.
- Arm's length. Not a foreclosure, not a family transfer, not a builder closeout.
- Similar in kind. Same rough age, same storey count, and either both with a pool or neither.
Before you file anything, check the record card
Ask the assessor for the property record card. It is free, and it is what the assessment was built from. Wrong square footage, a bathroom you do not have, a finished basement that is not finished, or an outbuilding removed years ago are all common — and a factual error is a much easier correction than a valuation argument, sometimes handled without a formal appeal at all.
Take this to the assessor
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