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You Owe How Much? – There’s Still Time to Appeal Your Property Taxes for This Year in San Diego County

Are you having sleepless nights over your property tax bill? As you probably are aware, Dec 10th is the final due date for the first installment of your property taxes. If you don’t agree with the assessed value there’s still time to appeal that assessment. November 30th is the deadline, so you need to act quickly. You can do this yourself -  you don’t need to pay one of those companies out there trying to get your money.

Go to their website  http://www.co.san-diego.ca.us/cob/aab/index.html  

and download the  application ‘assessment appeals’. This is a fairly straight forward process and explanations are attached. Something they don’t explain is when looking for comparative properties you will need to find homes which have sold no later than 90 days after Jan1st of the year you are appealing.

The property tax bill you have in your hands now is for July 1st 2008 – June 30th 2009, the comps you find will need to be sales no later than March 31st 2008. Go to Zillow or Trulia for home comp sales, or if you have a friend who is a Realtor, you could always ask them to print off some comps for you. Realtors are great people they do all sorts of things for free!

After sending the appeal in you will receive a postcard stating they have received your assessment appeal and will schedule a hearing date. Your assessors office should call you before this date to discuss the value of your property and try to come to some agreement over the telephone. If you don’t reach an agreement you will need to attend the hearing.

Good luck – it’s really worth the effort if you save yourself some dollars.