BG, the issue is the new assessed value on the supplemental tax bill. I will give an example to illustrate that this is definitely happening but I don’t know how widespread it is. I will not give the address or owner’s name of the example but I will say the following applies to a property in Mission Hills. This information is freely available on the web for all to see.
I will start with a sales history taken from zillow.com
03/27/2009 Sold $665,000 -2.2% Public Record
02/07/2009 Listed for sale* $679,999 -31.7% NRT Califo
03/07/2005 Sold $995,000 53.8% Public Record
06/17/2002 Sold $647,000 68.5% Public Record
02/04/1994 Sold $384,000 — Public Record
Next, I give the first part of the description used for the listing to show that this is indeed a REO.
“BANK OWNED! 3 BR/3 BA contemporary home in wonderful Mission Hills. ”
So far we know that the buyer of this house got a good deal basically paying a 2002 price in a prime area. But notice at the time there wasn’t even that much demand as the buyer didn’t even have to pay full price.
Now we get to the supplemental bill generated by the property transfer which is also available online.
“This is a supplemental tax bill on the above described property per R&T code section 75. This is a notice of value change on 03/27/09. This bill was mailed on 10/9/2009.”
New Assessed Value 600000 200000 800000
Prior Tax Rolls Value 600000 200000 800000
Increase In Assessment 0 0 0
We see that the supplemental bill matches the sale date but the new assessed value was unchanged. It was not lowered to reflect the sales price of $665k. It was lowered to 800k before this sale apparently as some type of automatic reassessment.
I don’t know what the final result will be for this particular house and have no idea if the owner even challenged this assessment. But I can say that there have been no new supplemental bills for this parcel that I can find and the assessed value according to zillow is still set to 800k.
I put up this information to illustrate that this is happening and buyer beware.
