With property values falling in our area, many of you have been astonished that according to the county your property value actually increased.

You should know that nothing is written in stone and that these things can be appealed. First, you should contact your county immediately to find out what the process is for an appeal. It's different in each county.

Now you need to start gathering data to support your contention. One source of help can be your real estate agent. I've helped clients in the past by putting together a current analysis of the market, including comparable home sales.

If you're doing this on your own, you're going to need to get information on what has recently sold in your neighborhood, and what it sold for. The homes you're using for comparison should me as much like yours as possible.

You should talk to neighbors about their assessments. There are a surprising number of clerical errors. If your assessment is completely out of line compared to neighbors with similar homes you've got good grounds for appeal.

Take into account factors that may decrease your homes value. What's going on in the neighborhood? Is there a heavy increase in traffic that impacts the value of your home? How abour rezoning?

Are there factors unique to your home that might affect the assessment? Do you have structural issues? Is there, for example, a crack in the foundation?

There are resources in the web that can help as you prepare your case. The Federation of Tax Administrators site has good background information on the appeals process for each jurisdiction. The American Homeowner's Association has a kit to help with this process. You can download it for free on their web site. And, the National Taxpayer's Union has a guide ($6.95) on fighting property taxes.

Lastly, I'd also urge you to remember that these same property taxes are the ones that pay for policemen, firemen, schools and school teachers, etc. If no one pays property taxes you might find you don't like the place you end up living in!

We've talked a little bit in the past about appraisals and we've talked about the use of comparables when deciding on a listing price. But I had something a little out of the ordinary come up this week and thought it might be of interest to everyone.

An agent called to say she was writing an offer on one of my listings in Warrenton. She also told me she was using the last settled comp (comparable) in that subdivision as a basis for the offer price. Now that seems perfectly reasonable. That's especially true given that settlement on this particular home occurred only about a week ago.

However, there are special circumstances at play here that definitely warrant a closer look. This particular unit is reasonably similar to my listing. However, it was never actually for sale in the multiple listing service. It was entered into the MLS solely for comparison purposes. A good clue that this is the case is when something is entered into the MLS as "sold" with zero days on the market. I called the agent for a little more background because there was something else unusual here. Generally if it's never really been for sale and is entered only for comparison purposes the List Price and the Sold Price are the same. However in this instance there was about $55K difference between them.

Basically, the home had been owned by a foundation that was liquidating assets. A private buyer became aware that this home was going to be sold and approached the agent about buying the property without it going on the market. The foundation was willing to take substantially less cash for a quick, cash sale with the property sold as is.

Now, I am a little concerned about this because certainly this will come up when an appraisal is done on my listing. But part of the appraisal process says that in order to compare "like properties" they should both have been exposed to the full competitive market. Clearly that didn't happen with this unit. And, I'll make sure I make the appraiser aware of this.

I also made the agent writing the offer aware of the background so that she understood the flaws with basing her offer solely on this comparable.

It's too soon to tell what the outcome will be as we haven't yet received the offer. But sometimes a comparable isn't really comparable!