Assessments are a year-round undertaking

It starts with a baseline economic sketch of a neighborhood. And little by little, Southampton Town Assessor Ed Deyermond and his staff fill in the details: a new pool here, a new deck there, and a recent sale that may indicate property values on the block are either soaring or descending into the cellar.

At the end of an exhaustive annual analysis that considers, to some extent, each one of Southampton Town’s approximately 51,000 properties, in July the office churns out a magic number for each property owner: The assessment, a figure that will factor heavily into his or her tax bill that December.

Over the course of the year-long process, Mr. Deyermond’s staff of 12 draws on a slew of sources to keep track of the ever-shifting property values in the nearly 300-square-mile municipality. The staffers sift through building permits to keep tabs on home improvements; they scan aerial photos for evidence of alterations; they monitor every property sale in town; they meet face-to-face with the homeowners themselves; and, when necessary, they make house calls.

“We know we have the most intensive program of any town on Long Island,” Mr. Deyermond said.

At the start of the process, he said, the staff organizes all of the properties on the map into several hundred neighborhoods, based on geography and economics. The assessment staff then might split those neighborhoods into sub-neighborhoods, based on factors like zoning or school district boundaries.

Assessors then estimate a base dollars-per-acre land value for each neighborhood and sub-neighborhood. They draw on numbers from nearby land sales to gauge how much an acre is worth in any given area—although the only land sales that qualify as benchmarks are “arm’s length” sales, according to Maureen Berglin, a real estate appraiser for Southampton Town. She described arm’s length sales as sales between a willing buyer and a willing seller, neither of whom is forced into the deal due to some kind of duress, and who are not striking an unusually sweet deal because they are related.

The idea, she said, is to make sure the sale gives the town a fair snapshot of how the market actually values the neighborhood.

“It’s all pieces that give you a clearer picture,” Ms. Berglin said.

The examined sales take place over the year before the assessment roll comes out, Ms. Berglin explained, meaning that the numbers lag. For instance, because Southampton Town is preparing the 2011 roll now, sales that happened in 2009 and 2010 are used. Mr. Deyermond said the next step is to take a closer look at the land underlying each individual property within each neighborhood or sub-neighborhood and tweak that base dollars-per-acre value. Many questions go into the determining. How big is the property? Does it slope? Is it flag-shaped? How much of it is buildable? Is it next to the railroad tracks, or does it overlook the bay?

“There’s a whole list of issues that would build up or subtract from the land value,” Mr. Deyermond said.

The underlying land, he said, could make up anywhere between 45 percent and 75 percent of a property’s total assessed value. “Land value makes up the bulk of the assessment, so that’s where most of our time is spent,” he said.

The rest, of course, is the house or structure on the property. Assessors consider more than 50 factors when updating the value of a home during a reassessment, Mr. Deyermond said. For instance, they look at the number of fireplaces, the number of bathrooms, the style of the home and even the type of siding.

When a homeowner calls his assessment into question, a member of Mr. Deyermond’s staff may pay them a visit, measuring tape in hand, to update the town’s records of the home. Workers in the assessors office also scan aerial photos of the town to look for properties that appear to have changed over the years, and deviate from the town’s records. Mr. Deyermond reported that Southampton Town last hired a company in 2008 to fly over the town and snap the images.

“We get a pretty good idea of what’s happening in the town,” he said.

Finally, the assessors add their value of the land to their value of the structure. The numbers come out in a preliminary assessment roll on May 1, marking the start of an 18-day grievance period during which residents can dispute their assessments. The final numbers for Southampton Town come out on July 1.

The town now reassesses its properties annually, but it wasn’t always so. Townwide reassessments have become more frequent over the years. The first one came in 1992, when the town hired a company to go door to door, measuring homes and taking stock of the features. The next one came in 2004, then another in 2006, yet another in 2008 and one each year since then. Previously, homes were reassessed only when the property changed hands.

“There’s a lot of really good, important reasons why it needs to be done,” Ms. Berglin said.

But another East End town has not been so keen on the undertaking. Longtime East Hampton Town Assessor Jeanne Nielsen declined to speak in detail about how her municipality goes about assessing homes because, she said, East Hampton has never conducted a townwide reassessment and the topic has proven controversial. She painted a picture of an out-of-whack distribution of the property tax burden in East Hampton Town.

“The 5 million and up properties in the Town of East Hampton are assessed at 50 percent or less of their full value, and properties of half a million to a million are valued at over 95 percent of their full value,” she said. As a result, Ms. Nielsen explained, it’s difficult to compare East Hampton Town’s assessment methods to Southampton Town’s.

“So it’s kind of like apples and oranges right across the board,” she said.

East Hampton Town Supervisor Bill Wilkinson did not return calls seeking comment on the matter.

As for Southampton Town, staffers will be testing out a new strategy this year: releasing property assessment estimates much earlier than usual, in March, in order to give residents more time to mull over and dispute their assessments, according to Mr. Deyermond.

The estimates will precede the preliminary roll in May by two months. Mr. Deyermond said that the intervening discussions between homeowners and the town will be informal, and not count as official grievances.

According to Mr. Deyermond, grievances have become more common in recent years due to the economic downturn. He said there were 7,500 grievances this year, up from about 6,500 last year and about 5,800 the year before.

While grievance time is often a whirlwind, Mr. Deyermond said the pace at his office never really hits a lull.

“It’s crunch time,” he said. “There’s always something happening here.”