Stowe property values double after reassessment - VTDigger (2024)

This story by Tommy Gardner was first published in the Stowe Reporter on June 20.

Got $1.5 million? That is now officially the average appraised price of a home in Stowe, following a townwide property value reassessment that recently wrapped up after two years of work.

Stowe town appraiser Tim Morrissey said that, while it seems these new values — which will be released next week — might have appeared overnight, Stowe hasn’t done a townwide reappraisal since 2012 and a lot has happened since then to the real estate market.

“In 12 years, we’ve seen it more than double,” Morrissey said.

The reappraisal was finalized in April, but the figures are still subject to change, as the town prepares for a series of grievance hearings from anyone who disputes their new property values. But as of now, here’s what the average values of residential properties look like:

• Houses on six acres or less: $1.11 million

• Houses on more than six acres: $2.47 million

• All those houses, combined: $1.45 million

• Condominiums: $977,450

Stowe’s grand list — the sum value of all taxable real estate in town — was already one of the highest in the state when it was valued at more than $2 billion. That figure is paltry compared to the new value of nearly $5.5 billion.

Morrissey said the new values will likely give Stowe the third highest grand list in the state, behind only Burlington and South Burlington. And those cities have, respectively, eight and four times the population of Stowe.

Taxes will not double

Morrissey was joined by his predecessor, Tom Vickery, along with the town’s long-serving board of listers, in conducting the two-year-long reassessment.

Morrissey and Vickery are careful to point out that, although the numbers are eye-popping, the increase on a person’s property tax bill won’t be as drastic. The town and education tax rates will decrease significantly, based on the new grand list.

This does not mean that taxes won’t go up — that’s just the nature of the current inflationary economy, paired with lawmakers warning of a statewide education tax rate increase nearing 14 percent.

It does mean, however, that a twofold increase in home value does not equal an analogous tax increase.

“You’re basically looking at a municipal tax rate that’s going to drop in half,” Morrissey said. “With the education rates, there are so many different factors that go into that.”

He added, however, that town listers and assessors don’t have anything to do with all that. Tax-rate setting is someone else’s job, out of Montpelier, not Stowe’s Main Street.

“Our job is just to appraise the properties,” Morrissey said.

Starting next week, when the reappraisal values are released, the town will publish the new property grand list on its website and make it searchable by name and location, so owners can compare their values to others’.

Property owners will also be able to determine, generally, what the tax impact will be, by comparing their localized “level of appraisal” to the townwide average of 44.77 percent. A notice from the board of listers going out to all Stowe property owners next week describes the level of appraisal as similar to the town-by-town common level of appraisal that the state uses to determine education tax rates.

If a property has a percentage value higher than that average, it will not be affected by the 2024 reappraisal, according to the listers’ memo.

“We want to give people an idea of what the effect is, because if you just see the number, you don’t see the effect,” Vickery said. “Most people are not going to be affected, really, very much, by the reappraisal.”

Equity and equitability

Morrissey said the townwide reappraisal, even though mandated by the state, is a good thing for everyone. Real estate has always been a hot commodity in Stowe, but he said the prices that homes were fetching ramped up starting in 2019, a trend that was only accelerated by the pandemic.

The problem was that homes assessed at one value were selling for double, triple or more than those appraised values, so the townwide reassessment simply trues things up.

“We want to make sure everybody is being treated fairly and equitably,” Morrissey said.

Throughout the process, appraisers were constantly comparing old lister cards with recent home sales, neighborhood trends and the constant evolution of the multiple listing service, the mammoth online database that real estate brokers use to provide data on properties for sale.

Over the past two years, the appraisers and listers delineated “neighborhood codes,” based on the observation that homes in certain parts of Stowe were selling at proportionally higher prices than in other areas in town.

“So, if we increase a neighborhood code, there’s more equity, and everyone is paying their fair share,” Morrissey said.

Vickery noted that this volatility in the market particularly affected Stowe’s condominium market, which is robust — of the total 4,094 taxable properties in town, 1,288 of them are condos. Although newer condos like the 48 units in the tony Spruce Peak area have sold for an average of $1.6 million, older ones like the Village Green condos were selling for $500,000, even though they were assessed in the $150,000-$200,000 range.

This means that, while the average Stowe condo price is $977,000, that figure is skewed on the high end by multi-million-dollar places, and there are still bargains to be found — Stowe-level bargains, anyway.

“When you look at affordability in this town, a lot of folks can’t afford to buy a single-family house with land, but a condo might be something they might be able to get into,” Morrissey said.

Two-year process

The state mandated three years ago that Stowe conduct a townwide property reassessment, giving the town a year to prepare for the work. The mandate came as Stowe’s common level of appraisal — the state’s measure of how a town’s assessed property values compare to what the fair market says they ought to be worth — was rapidly becoming less and less accurate.

It was not a Stowe-centric phenomenon. In the past few years, the state had mandated most towns to conduct such reassessments. Because there simply are not enough professional assessors out there for hire to do all that work, it has created a significant backlog, with some towns finding themselves on waiting lists several years long.

Stowe was able to avoid that by doing the work in-house, a luxury made possible when you’ve got a current appraiser who’s been in the job two decades teaming up with his predecessor who has served Stowe for 50 years, combined with a board of listers who have, in at least one case, more than half a century of experience with Stowe properties.

That familiarity may work both ways, in many cases. According to Morrissey, of the 2,272 residential properties in town, the listers were able to get inside 932 of them, and were able to walk around another 832 properties, combined with interviews with the owners.

“Other re-appraisal companies are getting into a much lower percentage of homes,” Morrissey said.

The Stowe crew had to settle for simply photographing 20 percent of the homes, after being unable to reach the owners. Only 2 percent of residential property owners flat-out refused to let listers on their properties.

However, even with those Morrissey had already visited many of them during previous townwide reassessments, in 2012 and in the late 1990s.

The team did hire a couple of data collectors and an office assistant this time around but didn’t have to bring in any assessment experts.

“If an outside firm had done this town, you’d be seeing a big difference in town, equity-wise,” Vickery said. “We know the properties.”