Residents will owe same amount of money overall.

by Julia O'Donoghue

Like many of her neighbors, McLean resident Nancy Ingrisano thought Fairfax County must have made a mistake when her home tax assessment arrived last week.

While the value of her property had increased significantly, the value of her actual home had decreased by two-thirds since last year.

The dramatic difference did not make sense to the longtime Fairfax County resident and once she began to hear from neighbors who noticed a similar change, Ingrisano became concerned.

"I talked to my nephew in Springfield who said the same thing had been going on there. I just thought that this had to be a gross error. … I could not accept that this reflected reality," said Ingrisano in an interview March 2.

After a few days of outcry and puzzlement from residents, Fairfax County's Director of the Department of Tax Administration Kevin Greenlief announced last week that his staff would recalculate the break down of land values and house values included in county residential assessments, though he stopped short of saying the original figures for home and property values were inaccurate.

The changes also would not affect the bottom line when it comes to a resident's overall property taxes, according to Fairfax County spokesperson Merni Fitzgerald.

Fairfax County calculates the value of a resident's real estate holdings as a whole before breaking it down into the seperate categories of home value and property value. Therefore, even if residents' home and property worths are recalculated, the overall amount of taxes owed will not change, she said.

"Once the bottom line assessment is done, some has to be allocated to the land and some has to be allocated to the building. We will be reviewing these allocations," said Fitzgerald.

Fairfax County officials said the significant jump in land values, which has to counterbalanced with a decrease in home values, was warranted given that the locality had not adjusted property values in several years. With the number of vacant land plots diminishing in Fairfax, county staff had to wait for several tax cycles to acquire enough information about what empty land sells for in order to produce an accurate figure, they said.

"Assessing in not an exact science, you have to look at sales prices and if you haven't had sales prices of land only, then you haven't had many things to base you assessment on," said Fitzgerald.

Despite a lack of political astuteness, several local appraisers said Fairfax's break down of land verses home values is probably more accurate than some residents would want to believe.

Houses, like cars, depreciate with time whereas land, particularly in a hot location like Fairfax County, increases in value. Appraisers said this why a house in Fairfax is worth a lot more than an identical house of the same age in rural Kansas.

Appraisers said many in many cases, particularly for homeowners in close-in suburbs like McLean, the land on which a home sits is worth a lot more than the structure.

"Because of the scarcity of land in Arlington or Fairfax County, its value is going way up and it becomes more valuable," said Brian Park, an appraiser based in Clifton. Park said this is particularly true of homes that have not been significantly remodeled.
Park estimated that the land a new home sits on in the outer suburbs would only be worth about 30 percent of the property's overall value.

Some residents still have a hard time believing that the land on which their home sits is worth so much more than their home. Ingrisano said she can accept that, in some cases with older developments, a home is only worth essentially the land it sits on.

She said she has seen older, less expensive homes in her neighborhood torn down so that a build can put a new larger house on the property. But in other cases, people have not simply torn down homes to build new ones and several residents still buy a particular house in McLean because of the way it looks, she said.

"The county is saying the land is more valuable than the home but [tear downs] are not happening on all of the properties. I do not think they can apply their logic to what seems to be an across the board formula," said Ingrisano.