Evaluating Your Assessment

Real Estate Evaluations

The revaluation will be based on an evaluation of the real estate collected from 2011 to December 2012. This phase of the revaluation process is collecting current information on each property that has sold since July 2011. Homeowners who have purchased their home since July 2011 will be visited and receive a form requesting that they verify basic information about the purchase price, the condition of their home at the time of sale, and other information which will enable the Assessor’s Office to determine whether their transaction will be used as part of our analysis. We ask homeowners receiving these forms to fill them out and return them to the Assessor’s Office.

Schedule

The Connecticut State General Statutes require that municipalities perform revaluation no later than five years after the last revaluation and that all real property is assessed at 70% of market value as of the revaluation date. The City of Bristol completed a full physical revaluation in 1998, an update in 2002, and another full physical revaluation again in 2007.

The next revaluation of real property assessments is scheduled for 2012. This revaluation project will not include a physical inspection of all real property. However, we will be inspecting property that has been recently sold.

The Importance of Taxes

The property tax, as the most important source of autonomous local revenue, often bears the brunt of criticism for the social, economic, and fiscal pressures on local communities. We fully understand that a revaluation can have a very real economic impact within the city once the results are released. Revaluations have a long history of creating intense conjecture and debate with respect to fairness and accuracy. It is with this understanding that we take great pains to ensure that every one of our appraisals accurately reflects current market value as defined by the State of Connecticut. We also work closely with our citizens after values are released to make sure the process is understood and accepted.

The City of Bristol and ultimately the taxpayers are heavily dependent on the property tax to pay for important services such as police, fire, public schools, waste disposal, and snow removal. It is through the delivery of professional, properly executed, cyclical property revaluations that the important task of ensuring that these vital property tax levies are fairly and equitably distributed.