It’s the time of the season. No, not for love, but for taxes. Hence, this post for the property tax paying homeowner. You.
Zillow allows a homeowner to voluntarily correct or add data to their home listed on Zillow.com. This additional or corrected data may increase the value or zestimate of the home. I have opined in the past that increasing your home value or zestimate on Zillow may have unintended adverse consequences. From the Tax Man. This issue was also raised by Seattle PI.com, in this report by the highly respected John Cook (Venture Blog).
Zillow has kinda sidestepped admitting risk of a higher tax bill to homeowners who gussy-up their home details, saying “Hey, if that happens, you’re paying your fair share of taxes, Mack.” (I’m paraphrasing. David G doesn’t talk like that). My reply was in effect, “It ain’t my job to help the tax man raise my taxes.” I think I quoted former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who basically said the same thing in many a tax case.
In any case, I still hold the opinion that the homeowner who supplements or corrects data on Zillow to increase their home value is at risk of a higher property tax bill because the tax assessor may be looking in on Zillow. And why shouldn’t the tax man use transparency for his purposes? Besides, if you’re adding the data, it might be true.
If the tax man does see that you, the owner, went to Zillow and changed 2 beds to 4, and 2,000 sq. ft to 3,000 , yada yada yada , he may decide your property taxes need to be raised. And what defense will you have when he says: “Hey Mr. Homeowner, don’t complain to us. You’re the one who input the data to raise your property value, not us.” I guess you’ll say: “Damn that Zillow”. (wait, that’s what I would say.)
Now, on this point, I want to share this recent comment from Marlow Harris, an experienced Realtor (and blogger) in the Seattle area:
One of my concerns is that the tax assessor will start using Z. to check property values. When asked it they’d use Zillow to assess property, our local tax assessor said they would use any information available to ascertain property values, and did not rule out the use of this data.
Interestingly, Zillow’s Rich Barton changed/corrected his home’s data (for his home improvements) to raise his zestimate. Why, you may ask.
Barton said:
I can see many reasons why homeowners would want to update the public record home facts that we have on Zillow with data that the homeowner knows to be current. However, my personal reason is that my house happens to be for sale right now. (quote source here)
I’m with Rich on this one. I’d wait until my house was up for sale before inputing updated and extra information on Zillow which might lead the tax assessor to send me a higher bill— let him send it to my buyer.
Happy taxes everyone.
Related Posts:
Mining the Elusive Unzillowable (if only for the comments. At the time, Zillow did not publish owner’s zestimates. To my comment that public data (fed to Z) may be inaccurate, incomplete or stale, David G said he had toured the tax assessor’s office and said the information was “double checked by many human beings” and …..there’s not much room for an error to make it the whole way through that system.” Yeah right.)
Did Zillow Actually Listen to Sellsius? Zillow admits its data may be screwed up and lets homeowners correct it. The tax man smileth.
Technorati Tags: Zillow, property taxes, zestimate, Seattle, Marlow Harris, John Cook, William o. Douglas, privacy
