Talking Down Your House
Ashlea Ebeling, 06.08.11, 06:00 PM EDTForbes Magazine dated June 27, 2011
More homeowners are appealing their tax assessments. Here's what to do if you get a tax-bill shock.
Patricia Quintilian had to convince an assessor that the second floor of her dome house was smaller than the first.
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After appellate lawyer Patricia Quintilian built a geodesic dome home on 27 acres in Goshen, Mass. in 2002, she was forced to develop a new specialty: property tax law. For five years in a row, she contends, the local assessor valued her home too high and made such basic mistakes as listing the first and second floors as having equal square footage. "It's a dome," she protests. One year she took the dispute up to the state's appellate tax board, which decided her home was worth only $241,600. The next year the local assessor was back with a new $355,600 valuation. "The property tax system is broken," declares Quintilian.
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