3 Reasons Why You Should Appeal Your Real Property Tax Valuation
If you’re like me, your real property valuation increased this year… A LOT.
Maybe not as much as in the great reappraisal of 2023, which sent the cumulative market value of property in Pitkin County skyrocketing by 85%, but a lot, nonetheless.
What is a Tax Valuation?
The Notice of Valuation (NOV) you may have recently received gets mailed to the address on file every 2 years on May 1st and the property’s valuation is the new figure upon which local tax mill levies are applied to produce your annual tax bill for the next 2 years.
In Colorado, real properties are reappraised at every odd-numbered year (in this instance, 2025) and the Notice of Valuation (NOV) states the value of each property as of the market on June 30th, or the Valuation Date, of the previous year (in this instance, June 30, 2024).
Appraisal timelines are typically 18 months preceding the Valuation Date, unless there is insufficient data, in which case they will go back even further by increments of 6 months until there is enough data. For 2025, Pitkin, Garfield, and Eagle Counties collected sales data from 07/01/2022 to 06/30/2024 to assign a value to each property as of June 30, 2024.
The Benefits of Appealing Your Tax Valuation Include:
1. The most obvious - potentially lowering your tax valuation and therefore, potentially lowing next year’s tax bill
-Lowering valuation does not necessarily correlate to a lower tax bill because the mill levies are not yet decided
2. Lowering this year’s valuation means the next assessed valuation builds from a smaller baseline
-Each year’s assessed value builds from the previous assessed value, so if you start with a lower valuation, your next assessed valuation will be lower by default
3. Protesting can only lower your tax valuation, so there’s no harm in shooting your shot.
-Even if they split the difference and meet you halfway in your requested valuation, it’s still lower than what they assessed, which is a win for next year’s taxes and the next valuation.
How to Appeal Your Tax Valuation:
The process of appealing your assessment is actually pretty straight forward.
1. Your county’s Assessor’s office will have a link to the “Comparable Sales” sheet they used to aggregate the numbers and come up with your property’s current year valuation. I put the document name in quotes because it’s really just a list of qualified sales by property type and is way too broad to be deemed comparable to any one property.
Click to see Pitkin County’s Comparable Sales page here
Click to see Garfield County’s Comparable Sales page here
Click to see Garfield County’s Comparable Sales page here
2. Find line items of properties that could be deemed as comps to your property based on home size, lot size, bed/bath count, and location.
3. From there, list out reasons why your property should be valued less than the comp and create a summary to provide to your county; painting the picture for them so they can see why your property valuation is too high and making the case as to why it should be valued at your suggested, lower figure. A realtor (aka me!) may also be able to help you with this.
4. Once you have your summary ready to go, you can mail or email your appeal in before the deadline of June 8th, 2025 (online states the deadline is June 9th for all 3 counties in the Roaring Fork Valley, but my NOV states June 8th, so I’m erring on the side of caution here). I’d suggest emailing as you’ll get a much quicker response, but that’s it! It’s really that simple.
I hope this was helpful in understanding a little more about your tax valuation, your right to appeal and process to do so, should you choose to do it! Feel free to use my contact information below if you ever have any real estate questions I can help with or if you’d like to see if I may be the right fit as your real estate agent.