PENFIELD, N.Y. (WROC) — This week, most folks in the Town of Penfield received their new home assessments for the year. News 8 viewers have written in saying their home assessments have skyrocketed, with percentages ranging from 10% to as high at 70%.
Kevin Lepel has lived in the same Penfield house for 13 years and said he has never witnessed his home value change, until now.
“Assessment came a couple days ago and the first time I opened it and saw the actual number of $65,000, I was a little bit surprised,” Lepel said. “Going from $287,000 and up $65,000 from there. I was not expecting that jump.”
Lepel suspects the price hike is coming from the raging housing market, but regardless, said he’s not happy about it.
“If my taxes go up, I’m really not gonna be happy,” Lepel said. “That’s the part I’m more concerned about. We pay a lot as it is already.”
While Lepel is worried about his taxes going up, Don Gibson said he isn’t worried about his taxes even though his assessment went up 27%.
“Their [Town of Penfield] calculations actually showed that my taxes would go down. But I don’t believe that,” Gibson said.
Penfield Town Supervisor Marie Cinti said the assessment process is normal in making sure taxes are fairly distributed. However, the reason why these price jumps seem so shocking is because an assessment hasn’t been done since 2014.
“If you let something go for a few years, obviously, it kind of catches up to you,” Supervisor Cinti said. “The other thing is that we do have a strong market, right? We all want our homes to increase in value, but we’ve had three years of very strong sales. And that does affect the market value.”
Matt Drouin works closely in our areas real-estate market and said the sticker shock everyone is feeling right now comes as no surprise.
“We’re in an extremely overheated real estate market. Is this truly a snapshot of what we have in terms of values going forward and perpetuity? Or is there going to be a market correction? Really, what we need to do is we need to identify strategies to increase new housing starts, and also to increase economic development and our areas to grow the pie larger, instead of trying to extract from the same pie, which is current homeowners,” Drouin said.
Supervisor Cinti said in a perfect world, 30% of homeowners will see no change in their taxes, 30% will see an increase, and another 30% will see a decrease.
If you would like to refute your home’s assessment, the original deadline to schedule an appointment with Penfield’s assessor was April 8, however that deadline has expanded to April 15.
Published by Rochester First
