This post is part of my effort to share information about Jersey City’s Property Revaluation. I wrote a Revaluation series last year which you can read here.
In a citywide revaluation, your new assessment should equal your market value. When establishing market value of your home, one set of data that can be useful is recent, comparable, usable home sales, where:
- Recent is a sale that’s occurred within the past 1-3 years, thus still has time-based relevance about market value.
- Usable, generally speaking, is a 3rd party sale. Technically speaking, a sale not otherwise coded by NJ state law as a non-usable sale.
- Comparable is sale of property that is an “apples to apples” likeness to your property (e.g. similar location, single family vs. multi-family, # of floors, # of bedrooms, etc).
I’ve written about determination of market value here.
Click here to enlarge the map in a new browser window.
Fine Print About this Map
Ratio ranges and qualification of “under”, “over”, or “fairly” assessed are based on the following:
- NJ Chapter 123 Law outlines the framework outlined in the terms bulleted below.
- Jersey City’s 2017 equalization ratio is 21.88.
- The “common level range” is a plus or minus 15% range around the equalization ratio. Properties assessed above or below this range may qualify for re-assessment, per Chapter 123 Law. Specifically:
- The upper limit of the common level range is 21.88 +15%, or 25.16. Properties above the upper limit are considered over-assessed and shown with red pin drops.
- The lower limit of the common level range is 21.88 -15%, or 18.60. Properties below the lower limit are considered under-assessed and shown with green pin drops.
Methodology
This is how the map was made:
- This is a Google map employing 4 layers. Layer 1 is the color-coded ward map and layers 2-4 are subsets of usable Class 2 property sales broken out by under, over-, or fair assessment categories.
- The color-coded ward map is available on Jersey City’s open data portal.
- 2017 property sales were downloaded from the NJ Assessments Records database. I used calendar year sales for simplicity of demonstration. [Note: the NJ Division of Taxation and county tax boards use fiscal year sales (July 1 – June 30) as a sampling period to set the equalization ratio. You can read more about the formal process of equalization here, excerpted from the NJ Tax Administrator’s Handbook available here.]
- Data was filtered as follows:
- Database Type: Current Owners/Asssmnt List
- Step 2, County: Hudson
- Step 3, District: Jersey City
- Step 4, Search Format: Advanced Search
- Step 5, Output Format: Excel
- Advanced Search Options:
- Class: 2….Residential Property (1-4 Family)
- Date Range: 1/1/2017-11/22/2017
Once downloaded, the data was “scrubbed” to remove data that wasn’t appropriate for inclusion in the map. Specifically:
- The map shows “usable” sales only, i.e. third-party transactions. Note: non-usable sales transactions (e.g. sales between family members, sheriff’s sales) are defined by statute and listed here.
- Usable sales were segmented based on ratio value. The “ratio” is a measure of the property’s assessed value to sales value.
- Under-Assessed: Defined as having a ratio below 18.60
- Fairly Assessed: Defined as having a ratio between 18.60 and 25.16.
- Over-Assessed: Defined as having a ratio above 25.16.
- To learn more about these ratios, and the mechanics that determine over-, under-, or fair assessment, read about Chapter 123 Law here. You can also read my recent blog post, Property Revaluation 401: Tax Appeal Math (Chapter 123 Law).
