Board of Equalization Meeting   7/19/2022

So obviously, David's not here.

If someone else could do that, well, it would be tough for me to chair while recording the minutes.

I wasn't planning to.

All right, Peter, I can go ahead and I'll keep, I have the form, I don't know if anybody else has the form, so I'll go ahead and keep track.

There's only a few things, items I think I have to keep track of, so I'll go ahead and do that.

Okay.

Okay, well, go ahead and call this meeting to order.

This meeting is being held pursuant to and in compliance with ordinance number 20A6,

The members present are myself, Anthony Arsali, Evan Mayo, Karen Pape, Bob Beard, Waki Wynn.

We are all electronically present.

The public has the opportunity to access and participate in the electronic meeting through phone, computer, or tablet.

Directions on how to connect are located on the Albemarle County website.

The failure to state these items either makes the electronic meeting illegal nor invalidates any action taken at the meeting.

We have a quorum today.

The next step is approval of the minutes of the, I believe our last meeting was June 30th.

Has everyone had a chance to review those minutes?

Thanks.

David sent the email back on July 1st.

Yes.

Okay.

Do we have a motion to approve those minutes?

I move to approve the minutes.

And a second.

Waki, I saw your hand first.

And then all in favor.

Okay.

All right, perfect.

Give it one second.

Let me just not that note who did what.

Okay, now let's move on to our first hearing.

So the applicants here can have them join us.

Good morning, Mr. Grubb.

Good morning.

Good to see you again.

Let's go ahead and get started here.

This is application number nine.

The property owner is Sam's Real Estate Business Trust.

The property address is 970 Hilton Heights Road.

So again, good afternoon and welcome.

I'm going to go through my spiel.

You probably know it, but we're the Board of Equalization.

The board is comprised of six citizens of Albemarle County who are appointed by the Board of Supervisors.

We're an independent board.

Here's how the hearing will work.

It's a little different than the years past where we do have time limits now.

You'll have 20 minutes to present your case.

The assessor will have 20 minutes to present theirs, and then you'll have another five minutes for rebuttal.

During the hearing, we may stop to ask you the assessor questions.

Mr. Grubb, I think you're frozen.

Yes, I can hear you.

I can hear you.

Okay, let me just go ahead and finish then.

Please know that per Virginia law, there is a presumption of correctness.

So the burden of proof is on the applicants.

Any questions before we begin?

Mr. Grubb,

No question.

Okay, we're going to go ahead and swear in the witnesses.

Raise your right hand.

Or if you want to turn off your video and just do it via audio, that might be better.

How about that?

OK, perfect.

OK, so I'll assume that you're going to be raising your right hand now.

I'm going to swear in the witnesses.

Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony, both oral and documentary, which you're about to give, will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

I do.

Thank you.

All right.

So let's go ahead and begin.

Mr. Grubb, feel free to start.

And just note that we have reviewed all the materials.

I'm assuming all of us on the board, we have received and reviewed all the materials that you did submit.

OK, well, thank you very much for your time.

And first, I'd like to talk about the taxpayers dilemma here.

We have the burden of proof to show that the assessment was incorrect.

But the taxpayer has no idea how an assessment was done.

The only way we know

how an assessment was done is if the assessor tells us, provides us complete and accurate information on how the assessment was done.

If we don't get that, it is impossible for us to meet our burden approved.

So I wanna walk through the way we approach this case and it's the way we approach most cases.

Okay, so on page four of the packet, what you'll see is the notice of real estate assessment.

So we see that and we see that the assessment on this property was $11,177,700.

So at that point, what we do is we get a letter of authorization from the client

and we send that with a letter to the county requesting sales, grids, any studies, any analysis they did to do the assessment because we need that information and we specifically request information that shows the calculations used to determine the 2022 assessment.

and a copy of that letter is on page 28 if you want to look at it.

What we got back from the county was on is on page five of our packet on the next page so if you could please now what this is is a copy of the the assessor's worksheet on the property that they sent us and sometimes this sheet is not correct sometimes they I mean they're only human sometimes we get the wrong worksheet

or sometimes it's the right worksheet, but the assessor didn't use the calculations to actually determine the value.

So what we do is we check that.

We look at that and we see, for example, the address.

The address is right.

The account number is right.

The name of the owner is right.

So everything seems to check.

And then what we go is to that block and we look at the appraised parcel.

So we're pretty certain now that we have the right worksheets.

So we proceed.

And if you turn to the next page, it shows the calculations that led to the assessment of the store itself.

And if you look on that page, you'll see that under construction detail, it shows this as a Class C warehouse discount store of average condition.

So

That's all checks out, that's right.

So we go to that box that says cost market valuation.

And when you see in that box, it's like in the top center of the grid there, cost market valuation.

There's a notation that says AYD, that's actual year built, 1992.

That's correct.

Right underneath it, it says effective year built, 2002.

We're looking at that, wait a minute,

How did they erase 10 years off the property's value, off the property's age?

So we look down to see if there's any justification for making that building 10 years newer than it actually is.

And we see under remodel rating nothing, we see under year remodeled nothing.

Right underneath that line, it says EYBDPR.

That number is 20.

That stands for Effective Year Built Depreciation.

Depreciation of 20%.

I'm looking at that and I know that's wrong.

Depreciation, even if they were right about effective age, depreciation is never a straight line of events.

and it's never based on a 1 to 100 scale.

So the average age of a building, the effective age of a building is not 100 years.

That's impossible.

No building lasts 100 years without massive remodeling.

So I know the depreciation has to be wrong.

So now I have two errors.

I know that they have an unsupported effective age of 2002, which is a violation of use perhaps standard 1-3.

An assessor must avoid using an unsupported assumption

on unsupported assumption about effective age.

And I could find nothing in the materials that they provided to us, how they support that effective age of 2002.

And what I've done is I've attached something to your works to this packet, and it starts on page 18.

And what it is, it's an article from Core Logic.

And Core Logic,

is the parent company of Marshall and Swift, which is the valuation service the assessor uses to value the property.

And it goes through, and you don't have to go into great detail about this, but essentially it determines that the proper support is a math problem.

So for example, if you have a building that was built in 1992, and you put an addition on there that expanded that building by 40% in 2018, then 40% of the building would be

have an effective age of 2018, and the rest of the building would be 1992.

Now, there are various ways you can do that, but it is a math problem, and we never received any of that math.

So that's an unsupported value change to the effective age.

So there's the first problem.

Then we go to the calculation of depreciation.

And those calculations, those grid are on page 23 of your packet.

and I'll give you a chance to get there.

Let me know if you're not there.

These are the life expectancy guidelines from Marshall and Swift, the very service that the assessors use to assess the property.

If you look on the right hand column of that, I've highlighted warehouse discount store average.

So it's a warehouse discount store in average condition,

and I look under class C on the column because it's a class C warehouse discount store and if you move down and connect those two lines you'll see that the life expectancy of this building is 30 years old.

Now life expectancy doesn't mean that the building starts to fall down after 30 years.

It means the useful age of this building is 30 years unless you've done something to improve that.

On the next page is the depreciation calculation from Marceline Swift.

So if you have a building that has a life expectancy of 30 and has an actual age of 30 years old, the depreciation is not 100%, it's 79%.

So instead of 20% depreciation, it should have been 79% depreciation.

but even if you believe them that the building was only 20 years old, the depreciation is not 20%, it's 53%.

So now we have two errors.

First, we have an unsupported effective age for the property and we have a miscalculation in the depreciation.

So it's pretty straightforward, right?

We package this thing up and we send it to the assessors for their review and the response we get back is, oh, we sent you the wrong worksheets.

As we actually use 69% depreciation and our effective age is not actually 20 years, it's actually 25 years.

So you see that we did nothing wrong.

And there's the dilemma.

So we went to all this work and did all this analysis and they sent us

what they claim is incorrect information now we've looked over those documents and we think we actually have used the right worksheets so our appeal is based on that and again we think there was unsupportive effective age and so you can't use an effective age you have to use the actual age and if you make that correction that would be a correction of roughly 2.3 million dollars and that's how we got to our value on page three of

$8,887,763.

And that's our case.

Now I'm gonna let them explain to you what happened, how we got the wrong information.

We don't think we did.

Thank you, Mr. Grubb.

Any questions for Mr. Grubb at this time?

Thank you, Mr. Arsali.

So back in on January 14, we sent I sent the proper record cards, which when I say property record cards, that's the thing.

That's the property record card.

So the property record card has general information about the property.

It is, you know, correct information regarding the property, the assessment, the sales history and stuff like that.

So we always include the property record card.

...to the taxpayer on commercial property that is valued by the cost approach, the Marshall and Swift or the MVP card, we call it.

Let me stop.

You're having the audio issues again with the background static noise.

Okay, let me know if it doesn't get it or if it gets worse.

So we initially sent on January 14th

Sorry to stop.

It's coming back again.

I don't know if everyone can hear clearly.

I only have one setting here that I go to change.

Billy, would you like to switch places?

All right, just for the record, I am not Billy Taylor, I'm Peter Lynch.

Okay, good.

Okay, so I'll just restart.

We sent at Marilyn Miner's request, she's an admin person, I believe, with the client, with the owner's tax rep,

I sent the property record cards to all of the properties that they requested them on on January 14th.

I realized that we had not sent the Marshall valuation cards to them.

And on March 3rd, four months ago, I sent the Marshall valuation cards

to show the valuation of these properties including this one and how it was calculated with the Marshall and Swift cost calculations.

On July 5th, I sent an email to Mark Rogers and Mark Rogers, if you have their packet on page one, Mark Rogers is the one who

signed the application.

So he, as far as I knew, was the person who was appealing this property for Wilkes-Arts.

And I sent him an email explaining that the Marshall and Swift card is the cost buildup for this property, not the property record card, which provides other information.

So, and in that, I explained that,

The property is not assessed based on 20 year effective life.

It's not assessed based on 20 years of, I mean, 20% depreciation.

It is based on a 25 year effective age because of the, all of the work that had been done, because of the actual age and the combination of that and the work that had been done some four or $5 million that was spent on the,

on the property since then through permits that we have.

And so the effective age is actually 25 years.

And you can actually follow exactly in the document that Mr. Grubb provided, or actually Mr. Rogers provided on their packet page 24.

and if you look at a 25 year effective life in a 30 year typical age, you see a 69% depreciation.

A 69% is what we include.

Mr. Grubb is trying to say that there's some kind of, you know, strange thing going on here that we didn't provide the information but we did provide it.

We didn't provide it first thing in January but we've provided it many months in advance of this hearing

and there should be no confusion over the fact that we were clearly stated that this is 69% and it's 25 year effective life.

So I just wanted to address that.

We feel that this Sam's Club is well supported.

There are sales of big box stores in the area throughout the state.

Thank you.

Any questions from the board?

Okay, so we've got a situation where we file an appeal, and we allege an error, and lo and behold, the document emerges after that and says, oh, no, no, we actually didn't make that mistake.

Even if that's suspicious on its face, but even if that is completely true, even if you look at the new documents they provided, there was still no support for a change in the effective age of the property.

If you look under their new worksheets, under year remodeled, they have a blank.

There is no information here on any $4 million of improvements.

We don't even know what that number means.

For example, if that $4 million includes

The gas station, well, we're not saying the mistake was made in the assessment of the gas station.

If it includes a repayment of the parking, we're not claiming that the assessment made a mistake in the assessment of the parking lot.

So we don't even know what that number means.

And there is no breakdown.

There is no way you can just take that number without providing some kind of support.

and turn it into a change in the effective age.

So even if they're right about all this and these are the real worksheets that we should be going by there still is no support for the effective age of the property and that is a violation of generally accepted appraisal practice and so you have to default back to the actual age of the property.

Now the calculation becomes a different

The calculation of error becomes a little different because now they're claiming they used a 69% depreciation.

So the error turns out to be a million dollars in the assessment, but there's still error in the assessment, even if we believe the story that this document just was inadvertently left out of our discovery requests.

Anything further at this time, Mr. Grove?

No.

Okay, any questions from the board?

Yes, I have two questions for you.

The first question is you just made the statement that even if the 69% is correct, there's still an error of a million dollars.

And so looking at the

worksheet that was provided to us by the assessor.

Can you, I'm not following the math on that because the 69% depreciation rate does calculate to the $3 million on page one of the revised sheet that was provided to us and I think provided to your firm on March the 3rd.

And then my second question of you is,

On page three of your application, you calculate these, you know, the miscalculated depreciation, as you call it.

And I'm wondering what was your replacement cost new?

I mean, you had to base that on something.

So let me answer the first question first.

So what we did was if they use a depreciation of 69% based on what they're claiming is an effective age of 25 years.

But there's no support for change in the actual age.

So we're using the actual age, which is 30 years, which would be 79 percent depreciation.

So we take their number on the cost, although I must warn you, if you get effective age wrong, your cost number is wrong, too.

But for the purposes of argument, we're going to assume that their cost number is right at 10 million dollars on the

The replacement cost new.

And then we multiply that by 0.79, which would be 79% depreciation.

And we get a depreciation number of $7,912,860.

And they only depreciated $6,911,232.

So if you go to the actual age, that's how you get to that million dollar difference.

in the assessment and assuming that page is right.

But our appeal is based on the assumption that

Our appeal is based on the assumption that the original worksheets were correct, because they come up with the correct value.

They show the correct value on that.

And we should be entitled to rely on that.

But even that aside, there's still a million dollar discrepancy in the assessment because they didn't support the effective age.

And even if we believe that they did use 69 percent appreciation,

You would still have a million dollar delta between those two numbers.

Now, your second question went to the calculation of the 20 year effective age miscalculation.

So what we had to do, because in those worksheets that we provided, they didn't give us a replacement cost new number.

We had to take the final number on that building

and we had to extrapolate back.

And what was your building cost?

We came in with a building cost.

If you did that, I do actually have that number here,

The building cost would have been $3,726,000.

And then we applied the 53% depreciation to that and took the difference between the two to create the delta of approximately $1.3 million.

I just want to make sure I understand.

Based on the information they gave us, they didn't tell us what it was.

So all we could do is take their 20% depreciation and take the actual number they gave us for the value and extrapolate back to create that number.

Because again, that's our dilemma.

If we don't get provided with the information, it becomes very difficult for us to do our job.

Any other questions from the board?

I do.

I have one more question.

Correct.

There'd be no other way to interpret that because, I mean, assessors do that all the time in Virginia, and I don't know about in this jurisdiction, but they do that all the time.

They say, oh, it's really 20 years old, 1% a year.

Any other questions?

I have, Mr. Grubb, I mean as you, I'm assuming you recall, we've had, we've been doing this, we've had this appeal, I mean each year we're going to consider it differently, but we've, I believe you've presented an appeal for the same property for the last four years straight.

The 4 point something million or almost 5 million in permits and improvements have come up every single year.

And I'm looking back at last year's card and it appears that they had the effective year built.

I'm trying to find where it looks like the, well, actually it appears that the depreciation is pretty similar in terms of the 69%, it's a little less than that.

Did you not look back at the prior year's information that you had?

Yeah, we just looked at this year.

In other words, we checked to see if that's the right worksheet.

And there it is.

And there's the math.

So we have no reason to believe it's not true unless we're told otherwise.

Let me talk about the previous years, if I can talk about the previous years appeals.

So what we've done in the past, as we've said, look,

These properties are way over based on the sales comparison approach.

And we've been unsuccessful with that.

So we said, well, let's just look at their cost approach and show the board the errors in their cost approach to try to get at the right value that way.

So if you take this and because the two sets of worksheets, they're even different on the square footage of the store.

So, you know,

I don't even know exactly what they used, but they valued this property at either $78 a square foot or $82 a square foot, depending on which sheets you believe.

We know that a Sam's Club sold in Richmond in 2020 for $52 a square foot.

So we know ourselves, but we've tried to make this case before to the board and the board just hasn't accepted our argument.

So this is the new tactic.

Yeah, this is kind of macro.

Walmart has a market cap of $353 billion.

Is this part of an effort by Walmart to challenge assessments around the country to try and raise revenue?

I don't know how relevant it is to this case, but let me explain that to you.

What happened is that Walmart never really had a real estate tax division until 2018, because their assessments were so high, they said, we've got to do something about this.

In 2018, they started organizing this, and they started hiring lawyers in all the jurisdictions to represent them.

because they were so over-assessed, more than other big box retail stores.

So we've been representing this client since 2018.

It's no recent move.

You know, Walmart in the past has said, well, taxes are taxes and we just have to pay them.

But they're getting too unfair.

So we have to contest these things.

And it's not just in Virginia.

It's everywhere.

And it's not just in Charlottesville.

You know, there are a few jurisdictions that

Well, actually there are more and more jurisdictions that we don't appeal anymore because they've come down.

Thank you.

All right.

Seeing none, Mr. Grubb, thank you for your time today.

I do have a question.

You're allowed to ask Peter a question.

I'm curious about that discrepancy between the, if I'm looking at sheet six of the Mr. Grubb's presentation, square footage is 132,000.

10 square feet, and then looking at your cost sheet, I'm seeing 140,146 on card three of three.

Yes.

So there are two different cost models within Vision.

One of them is the residential cost model and the other one is the commercial cost model, the MVP or Marshall and Swift.

The way the square footage shows up on page number six, that's one section of the total.

The building's broken down into sections.

Typically it's based on the wall height or sometimes if the use is different, you'll put it in different sections in the system.

So the 132,010 square feet is one section.

If you look at page...

Unfortunately, there are multiple pages to this.

If you look at page 10, there's an additional 6,300 square feet.

If you look at page 14, there's an additional 1,836 square feet.

All of these should add up to the 140,000 square foot number.

They're just shown differently in the different parts.

This property record card is not intended to show valuation or the digestible cost information for a commercial building.

I'll just add that it's been four years.

He's brought the same appeal.

I know he talked about the whatever, I forgot the theory, the whatever it is, the closed-door theory thing.

And now he's bringing this.

The information's been consistent.

I mean, he's taking the one sheet out of one thing that's been corrected or was not correct, but the number still comes out the same.

The improvement value from last year to this year hasn't changed much.

And that information regarding the four point something million dollars in improvements has been provided to them multiple times.

Every single year this issue comes up.

So

I don't see a justification for changing the value.

I think it's well supported.

I think land value, again, I think we've talked about this before, I think land value is low for what it is.

And then the structure, it appears to be

I mean, it's been the same number, it's been consistent.

I don't think the idea of this being at 3.3 million as a new cost or trying to use those numbers to kind of work up something just doesn't make sense.

So that's my two cents.

Any other thought or discussion?

Karen, is there anything else you wanna add before we kind of move forward?

Yeah, sure.

You know, I've noticed that, of course, you are very consistent if you compare his actual assessed numbers from the sheet that you gave him versus, you know, it's reconciled perfectly with your total improvement value on the card on your cost card.

So I think there is no issue with that.

I'm a little confused as to how he calculated that you changed your

effective age to 25 years, but I'm still seeing a 69% depreciation, so I think that's fine.

On his page six,

That is the residential model's effective age, which has no bearing on this property at all.

Okay, I see.

All right.

And then with regard to his concern about not being provided the information, you know, on page 26,

It seems to me that the assessor was well within his time limits because under F of number six, he's got to make available for inspection any information within five days, five days prior to this meeting.

So you met that.

I mean, it costs new of this building of $3 million that he estimated his depreciation on seems unsupportable.

You know, when I asked him that second question about his depreciation estimates that he based it on a cost new, he backed into that number because he said he had no cost new figures.

And he claimed that the cost new of this building would be $3 million, 140,000 square feet.

That's, seems very low.

I don't have any other comments.

I think that the,

Should we have a motion?

Karen, do you want to make the motion?

Sure.

Do we have a second?

I second the motion.

All in favor?

All right, so that assessment is affirmed.

Our next hearing's at 10.

Is the applicant here yet?

Okay, should we, I guess we'll step out until 10?

Okay, and we'll keep it recording.

We'll just turn on our cameras.

Okay, see you all at 10.

Okay, good.

Good.

All right, then.

Get rid of that other one.

Is the African on?

Mr. Arsali, do you hear me okay now?

Yeah, it's a lot better.

Okay, great.

Good morning.

I know you put it in fanatical.

So it's Mr. Raquet.

Raquet is it?

Yes.

Perfect.

Can you hear me okay?

We can hear you well.

All right.

Wonderful.

Good morning and welcome.

This is application number 28.

Owners are Steven and Diane Raquet.

The property address is 216 Claremont Lane.

We are the Board of Equalization.

That's myself, Anthony Arsali, Evan Mayo, Bob Beard, Karen Pape, and Waki Wynn.

We are, the board is comprised of six citizens of Albemarle County.

Only five of us are here today.

Each of us were appointed by the board of supervisors.

We are an independent board and we will be hearing your case today.

Here's how the hearing will work.

You will have 20 minutes to present your case.

The assessor will have 20 minutes to present theirs and you'll have another five minutes for rebuttal.

During the hearing, we may stop to ask you and assessor questions.

OneNote, the Virginia Law, there is a presumption of correctness, so the burden of proof is on you as the applicant.

Do you have any questions before we begin?

I believe I do not.

Okay, perfect.

So let's swear in whoever is planning on testifying in this hearing.

So if you can please raise your right hand.

And for the Assessor's Office, okay, Mr. Hernand.

Perfect.

Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony, both oral and documentary, which you're about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

I do.

Thank you.

Okay.

So first of all, thank you very much everyone for taking the time to hear my appeal.

I do appreciate the time.

And I also want to, I think hopefully you all received the materials I sent ahead of time and I forgive, forgive me repetition.

I'm essentially going to go through exactly what I sent you.

But so same way as I sent you, I want to start by opening and saying that

Really, I've been treated with great professionalism by the Assessor's Office.

I have great respect for what they do.

So this appeal in no way is meant to disparage their processes, their professionalism, or anything of that nature.

So I believe that they follow rules and procedures that govern their profession and whatever specifics of the county.

But as a practicing engineer myself, I also have to follow a lot of rules, procedures, policies that guide my daily business as well.

But I also understand that standard processes and standard procedures don't necessarily cover

All the different situations that I may find myself in and that there are exceptions and when I need to take exceptions I go to my superiors who are authorized to make decisions whether that exception is a prudent one or an allowable one or not.

And so in this case, I'm simply, I see something that may be an exception and maybe it is not.

And that is up to, I think, sort of what I understand is for you folks to decide whether this is an exceptional situation or not.

So as you probably are aware, I'm not trained as an assessor.

So if I come across a bit naive, please forgive that, that if I don't understand the whole scope of what's supposed to be considered, bear with me.

So

To the meat of basically what I see as the situation, we well know that assessments in our county are based on market value.

And so really what I'm putting forward is what I think is substantive market value data.

that is reflective of my particular house and property that may be different from the trends reflected by other houses and properties even in my immediate vicinity for reasons which I really cannot necessarily explain, but simply that they are there.

So in November, 2020, we bought our house and for $535,000,

It was on the open market.

So my niece who was our agent, she's been in real estate for 15 years here in Almar County in Charlottesville City.

When we put in the offer, there was only one offer on the house, which surprised her.

So for whatever reason, we were the only offer and we ended up purchasing the house.

Seven months later, the house across the street was sold for $545,000.

Again, actually with the help of the Assessors Office, they gave me some insight to, for whatever reason, there was one offer there after a failed contract.

And again, but one offer certainly in a time when, as my niece characterized it, her standard process was put the house on the market on Thursday, have showings on Friday and Saturday, open house on Sunday, compare offers on Monday and pick one.

Was the wash, rinse, repeat.

So for whatever reason though, there wasn't a flood of offers for the house across the street.

As a person who enjoys their house, I'm not quite sure and enjoys this neighborhood street, I can't account for that.

But these two houses are the same design, same builder, similar finishes, everything I can tell.

There's no substantive difference between the physical structures, the property size.

We both have side patios.

We are on the same street, so we have the same view or lack of view, same basic nearby things.

So my point or point, my, yeah, I guess point is the correct term.

My point is that maybe this is a situation where because you have

you know, the price of the very specific thing, recent data for the price of the very specific thing, which you are trying to set the value of on the open market, that that data may be worthy of higher weighting than say other data of the surrounding properties, which for, you know, in various ways have differences, significant or non-significant from our property.

So I think that's really the information I had to present in the package I sent were photographs to try to as best I could substantiate that they are the same, they're carbon copies of each other essentially.

And thank you for hearing me.

Thank you.

Anyone on the board have any questions at this time?

Thank you.

So I'm going to speak a little bit, and certainly Louis will be available to answer questions.

He's the appraiser who handles this neighborhood of Old Trail Village single family properties.

So Mr. Raquet, thank you for your presentation.

raised the question about exceptions.

And in our business, just like others, we would have exceptions.

But those exceptions would be in a neighborhood where there was one or two sales and we have to figure out how those very few amount of sales would kind of affect value or what is it really telling us for value and what do we do with it.

In the case of Old Trail Single Family, we had

Just in 2021, 53 sales of properties.

I think two of those were land and the rest were all homes and some were brand new homes, some were five or six years old like the subject property.

and so our model it's basically we're looking at as mass appraisers is our model of working appropriately for this neighborhood.

So out of these 53 sales, we come up with our analysis of assessment ratios.

The ratios ranged from as low as 75%,

to as high as 139%.

And that was a land sale code.

So the land sales tend to be a little off.

But improve what sale-wise, it went up to 120%.

If you look at that in aggregate and the analysis of it,

We're looking at the median ratio for that group of sales, which was for this year 0.9958, or practically 100%, which is our target for an assessment level.

And the COD, which is variance of that range of

Ratios was an 8.53, which our guidelines say they should be between 5 and 10%.

This is a pretty homogeneous neighborhood, so it shouldn't be higher than 10, but our number being 8.53 means it's pretty well within the range.

So analysis-wise, as we look at the data,

Universe of sales that we had, we're doing pretty well.

So this comes up to kind of a point of this sale across the street from Mr. Raquet.

Why is it so low?

in comparison to its own assessment this year, which is similar to Mr. Racquet's assessment, where it sold for $545,000 in 21.

And we have not been able to find definitive information that would say, I mean, we know that the property was

was not lived in by the owner, it was a rental.

We know that there was an initial offer on the property which fell through.

And I do have to correct the information that we provided to the board.

We found out yesterday that we said that the owner got cold feet when the first listing was in, but it was really the first buyer that came in that got cold feet.

So I just wanted to correct the record about that.

Our information from the agent that we spoke to was that

The owner was motivated to sell and that there were not multiple offers on this property.

And that's very unusual in 2021.

Many, many properties had multiple offers to compare it as Mr. Raque had mentioned.

I mean, it was definitely a seller's market.

So we just don't know, we have not been able to say this is exactly why that property sold for so low compared to what we think it should based on all of these sales that we have, which is 53 sales in this area is a huge number to work with, which we love to have all that information.

However,

The reason why we use these indicators of central tendency basically, you know, your median value or your median ratio being at 100% and talk about variance is because we're looking at an aggregate of things and we can't, we don't want to use the lowest one or the highest one.

You know, we wouldn't want to come in here and say, well, his houses actually were 700,000 because there was a very similar house.

that sold for 7.25 or something like that.

So we're really looking for that central tendency of what those sales are showing us.

So I think that's what the case is here, that the house across the street sold for less than market, that there were sales that have lower than 100% ratios, there are sales that have above 100% ratio, but in general, we're right in the right place.

And then I had one thing to add, Mr. Raquet paid, as he said, paid 535 back in 2020, which is, you know, basically two years ago.

and that's a 13.8% increase from his sale price to the current assessment.

And based on the market that we've had over the last year or longer two years, 13.8% is actually right in line with the increase in assessments that we've had on all of our property, all of our residential properties over that two year period.

I just wanted to add that I will give Louis an opportunity if I've missed anything that he wants to point out that he can add at this point or he can just help me answer questions that he may have.

And then we are done, Mr. Arsali.

Louis Scott, feel free to go ahead.

Okay, any questions from the board?

All right, I don't see any.

Sirak, do you have a rebuttal?

No, not a rebuttal because I don't disagree with any of the data and information and rationale that the assessor has put forward.

I think we're in agreement that it's a curious situation and so I simply put forward that's a curious situation for you guys to consider and if it's, you know,

is curious and we and going with the statistics is the right thing then that's the way then that's the way it goes and uh just in the assessor mentioned the 750,000 sale you know this year which of course wouldn't reflect 2021 but I also am quite in realization that if my logic uh is it prevails I may be speaking in um

against my own long-term self-interest because next year they should take that, because it is an identical house to us, a few streets over and you know jack me up pretty significantly based on my own logic that I would do.

Well, appreciate that.

I appreciate the candor on that.

Yeah, it's a tough one.

I understand having that one sale that's identical house, but yeah.

So I think if there's nothing further from anyone else, I will thank you for your time on behalf of the board and then expect the decision within the next two weeks in the mail.

And once again, thank you to everyone for your time and attention.

It is, I appreciate it.

No, no, not at all.

We appreciate it.

We appreciate your presentation.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Raquet.

All right.

All right.

I'll start it then.

Take care.

I'll step into David.

You know just looking at your assessments on your assessor provided comparable sales I just did a broad brush and you know your sale one is assessed at $218 a square foot as is your subject sale two is assessed at $221 and well sale three is you know $248 because it's got that finished basement so

You know, it does appear to be in line from an equalization standpoint.

I appreciate his observation and the way he handled it.

Anyone else have any comments?

Thank you, Waki.

Any second?

Bob?

All in favor?

Aye.

And yes, one last point.

I would agree that I really appreciated this applicant's, how he presented this case and it was

Even though it's really difficult to do in a uniform subdivision, he had a difficult argument to make, but it's nice to have a more friendly and organized argument.

We can keep it recording and send it to all our applicants and say, this is how we would appreciate you presenting.

All right, I think this is our last hearing.

No, this should be it.

The only thing that we would see after this is any supplemental appeals that we get, and it would fall into those later dates that start in September.

but we have never had one.

I don't wanna jinx it or anything but we've never had one as long as I've been here and I think even the years before I got here.

So it's unlikely.

It would basically be if we pick up a new house right now and the owner didn't like the value.

Obviously we would go through the exact same reviews session that we would do on any of these first to figure out what we did but then if he ended up coming then we would let you all know and set up one of those dates that we've already

reserved in those months.

But otherwise, we will see you next year.

Thank you.

Thank you, Evan.

Do we have a second?

I'll second.

Karen, I'll give you this one.

I think you'd be selected to play a second.

All in favor?

All right, we'll see you all next year, hopefully.

See you next week.

All right.

Enjoyed working with all of you.

Thank you, guys.

Have a good one.

Bye, everyone.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Stop the recording, please.