Bay County Property Appraiser is responsible for identifying, locating, and fairly valuing all property, both real and personal, within the county for tax purposes. Apparently, the market value of the real property is based on the current real estate market. Estimating the market value of your property has the same meaning as discovering the price most people would pay for your property in the current condition.
The most important thing to remember is that the Bay County Property Appraiser does not create the value. Everyone establishes the value by buying and selling the real estate in the market place. Bay County Property Appraiser has the legal responsibility to study those transactions and appraiser your property accordingly.
Aside from that, Bay County Property Appraiser also tracks the ownership changes, maintains the maps of parcel boundaries, keeps descriptions of buildings and property characteristics up to date, accepts and approves applications from the individuals eligible for exemptions and the other forms of property tax relief, analyzes the trends in the sales prices, construction costs, and rents to best estimate the value of all the assessable property.
How is the property appraised? At least once each year, Bay County Property Appraiser or a staff appraiser will visit and inspect each property. However, you have to know that the individual property values may be adjusted between visits in light of sales activity or the other factors affecting the real estate values in your neighborhood. The strong indicators of the value in the real estate market are sales of similar properties.
In order to estimate the value of a property, Bay County Property Appraiser has to identify the properties that have sold, their sale prices and the terms and conditions of the each sale. Every transaction has to be studied in order to make sure that it is the arms length transaction.
A thing called the arm’s length transaction is the sale involving the willing seller and the willing buyer without any undue pressure or the special incentives such as the family relationships. It also can be mean that the property was on the market for neither the excessive nor short period of time.
Once everything has been determined, Bay County Property Appraiser can base the value of the property on sales of comparable properties. This is the reason why the Bay County Property Appraiser maintains the accurate data base of the real estate information.
There are two other methods that are considered to appraiser property. Those are the cost approach and the income approach. According to the official website of Bay County Property Appraiser, the cost approach is based on how much it would cost today to build the almost identical structure on the parcel. As for the income approach, it requires the study of how much revenue your property would produce if it were rented as the apartment house, the store, the office building and so on. in addition, Bay County Property Appraiser must consider operating expenses, taxes, insurance, maintenance costs, and the return or profit most people would expect on the type of property you own.
