Residents in Peterborough have expressed concerns over the recent town-wide reassessment of property values, and the Select Board is planning to hold a public meeting on the matter in the coming weeks.
“The Select Board really can’t do anything about the assessment; we’re holding this meeting because there have been questions,” said Select Board member Bill Kennedy at Tuesday’s Select Board meeting. “We want to clear the air.”
The issue was brought to the Select Board in January. Resident Sharon Monahan said she was the first to notice there was something in the reassessment worth questioning. As a septic designer and a member of the Zoning Board of Adjustment she said that she has experience looking at assessments and believed that the way Peterborough’s assessing was done was skewed.
“It was through my own individual inquiry,” she said.
The town’s assessing is done by Corcoran Consulting. The full reassessment occurred because the state calls for a ratio comparing the municipal assessed value to market value to be between 90% and 110%. Due to recent market fluctuation, the town’s ratio was down to 71%, meaning that the town’s assessed value was far lower than its actual value. Assessing is overseen by the state Department of Revenue Administration, which monitors and gives final approval of assessing processes and methodology. According to Peterborough assessing clerk Ali Kreutz, the DRA has not alerted the town to any errors or concerns.
Monahan’s complaint, she said, lay with the method used by Corcoran Consulting, which she said was flawed due to the calculation of land values. These land values are an important component of assessing, as the value of land cannot be ignored when assessing a property.
According to town Assessing Clerk Alison Kreutz, who spoke on the issue at the Select Board meeting in January, the method in question took the total sale price of a property and subtracted the established building and other new value to determine the land value. This was done due to a lack of available data on land sales in town.
“They did it based on limited sales data,” Monahan said of this method. “It’s always been based on comparative sales in the past.”
She said it led to land values of different neighborhoods being equated, including neighborhoods where the capacity for building similar properties – and thus, properties of equal value – would not be feasible.
“The only way to get it corrected is to call attention to the fact that the neighborhood codes do not make sense,” Monahan said.
Another resident, Bob Bolt, said another impact of this method was that it led to an unfair increase in the value of some properties and not as much increase on others. In particular, he said that he found a pattern where smaller properties had larger increases in value, and larger properties did not have similarly large increases in value.
“The bottom line is, the people with smaller properties got hit with a huge increase in the latest round of tax bills, and the people with the bigger properties got hit with a much smaller tax increase, and that’s sort of my complaint,” Bolt said.
This leads to not just unfairness, but inequality, he said.
“Assessment is supposed to be about equity or equality, so if two houses are about the same, they should pay the same amount in taxes,” Bolt said. “It’s totally skewed in the opposite direction.”
Lisa Stone, a Peterborough resident and real estate agent with Keller Williams Metropolitan, had a different perspective on the issue of the lot sizes.
“I know that people often think that what they have and what they desire in real estate is what is of value,” she said. “So if you own 10 acres in the woods, you think that is of great market value compared to someone who owns a third of an acre in town, but the people coming to shop in this town may think the smaller lot is of more value.”
A real-life example of this, she said, is the influx of city-dwellers into New Hampshire during the pandemic. These residents, used to apartments or small lots in big cities, would be very content with smaller lots.
“Having a third of an acre is like heaven to them,” she said. “They wouldn’t know what to do with 10 acres in the woods.”
Stone said that from her perspective, the assessment was necessary in terms of catching up with what she has seen for market values. Additionally, the level of increase lines up with what she said she has been seeing in the real estate market. In 2020, she said the median sale price for a single-family residential home was $322,500. In 2021, it was $367,500.
“Do I think people have the right to learn more about the assessing process? Absolutely,” she said. “Do I think having a meeting and discussing the assessing process is going to change the assessment of people’s homes in Peterborough? No, I don’t.”
The Select Board supported the call from residents for a public meeting on the issue, where the assessor from Corcoran Consulting, Marybeth Walker, will be available for questions, as well as Sam Greene, the assistant director of the DRA’s municipal and property division; and Lisa Mudge, the DRA district appraiser supervisor for Peterborough’s area.
“They’ll be here to make a presentation, explain the methodology, answer questions from the public,” said Kreutz. The timing of the meeting will also give those left unsatisfied time to file for an abatement by the March 1 deadline.
“This affects a lot of people,” Monahan said. “I want it addressed in public. This way the public can ask questions.”
“I hope that Corcoran Consulting admits they made a huge mistake and that they reassess the entire town and do it in a more fair and equitable way,” said Bolt. “It’s not about an individual person, I’m looking at the entire big picture. I just want everybody to pay their fair share.”
The presentation and meeting on the reassessment will be held in the town meeting house on Feb. 15 at 5 p.m.