I’ve never read Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.” Maybe I should, because I was curious enough one day to go down the rabbit hole of property taxes to find, as she did, a nonsensical world. According to one Cliff-Notes-style synopsis of the story, “after numerous incoherent adventures involving a Hatter, a Hare and the Queen of Hearts, she wakes up in time for tea.”
So maybe this is all just a bad dream. Perhaps I’m ready to wake up in time for something to drink. A safe bet it would not be tea.
And, as lamented before on this topic, I can also commiserate with Al Pacino’s Godfather character in movie-number-three when he says, “just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.” The 2024-pay-2025 updated assessments were mailed out last week as promised. And as perfectly predictable, continue to befuddle.
Wells County Assessor Laura Roberts reports that total assessments are up almost 10% — 9.89% to be exact. So if your assessment went up more than that, you are above average. Congratulations. If it’s lower than that, count your blessings. She added that 168 new parcels were added this year, led by 44 new lots in Greenfield Farms on Bluffton’s south side. That strikes me as a significant number and perhaps bodes well to ease what has been described as a housing shortage.
The assessed value of one of the properties I’ve been tracking went up a whopping 44%. The neighbors in their cul-de-sac went up 9, 20, and 15%. Another property in a different neighborhood went up more then 13%; their neighbors’ AVs went down … fractionally — like -0.07% — but down. Both homeowners confirmed they made no improvements in the past two years.
Most neighborhoods seem to have some degree of consistency within each, but they vary from moderate increases to high-teens, percentage-wise. My samples in the Timber Ridge area that has seen huge increases the past few years saw practically none, while my sampling of Liberty Center homes that have seen decreases got double-digit increases this year.
A sampling of residential rental properties finds some increases of 36%, many remaining exactly the same and a couple others reduced to their prior years’ amount.
I’ve been tracking about two dozen commercial/industrial properties throughout my journey through Wonderland. The group includes The News-Banner building. The average increase from last year to this year of assessed value of this sampling is a meager 2.43%. We’re feeling a bit picked on at 125 N. Johnson St. — the N-B’s AV went up 14.4%. Even less apparent would be the cause of the change in AV of the medical building on Ossian’s south side owned by the Lutheran Health Network. It’s AV went up a whopping 80%, from $297,300 to $535,000. We drive by there often; I don’t recall them doubling their space or even adding a new sign.
Much of this, I presume, is explainable. I’ve not yet peppered Roberts with any specific questions; still nosing around. As you may have seen, we published a guest column penned by Roberts last week with her forewarnings about the new assessments being in the mail. In it, she cited some statistics from the northeast Indiana Realtors that Wells County’s median sales price for 2023 rose 20-some percent while Adams County’s went down about 2%. I found that interesting. Is there that much more demand here and that much less supply? Are our properties now worth so much more because people want to live here and not in Adams County? So I asked a couple local real estate gurus why that might be. It is not, I was told by both, due to any big discrepancies in the number of homes for sale or sold last year. Wells County is quite comparable to its neighbors in that regard.
Neither puts “a lot of stock,” as one phrased it, in those figures because they are just a snapshot in time and are subject to a variety of factors that can distort the numbers. Jody Holloway took the time to pull up the details and found that, for example, there were almost twice as many high-end transactions here in 2023 than 2022 and significantly fewer sales under $100,000; the opposite was likely the case in Adams County. It is not unusual, he added, that a number of rental properties change hands when one investor either retires or otherwise decides to get out of the business. These transactions can distort averages either way.
Roberts also asked that taxpayers do some research before making an appeal which is indeed a very fair request. But if your AV went up significantly more than your neighbors and you’ve not hammered a nail, I think you have a fair question at least. Our neighborhood went up an average of 9.75%; our home “only” 5.62%. But one of the similar villas went up 19.4% and about a half-dozen went down 2.56%. Guess who might be calling to inquire?
My research has also included comparing Gross AVs in comparable counties. The new data for all the counties is not yet available but between 2021 and 2023, Wells County’s total assessed values rose at a higher percentage than Adams, Huntington, Wabash, Miami and Noble counties. The largest difference was between Wells and Adams — ours increased 23.2% and Adams County increased 16.7%. I think that raises more questions than the median sales price numbers.
Curious — like Alice — I plugged in the square miles of these counties (they’re relatively similar) and calculated the AV per SM (Assessed Value per Square Mile). Interestingly, Wells, Adams and Huntington are quite similar at just over $9 million per square mile while Wabash and Miami are less than $7 million.
Hmm. Why that is? Maybe the Mad Hatter knows. Maybe I’ll wake up soon and sip some tea. Or whatever.
miller@news-banner.com
