<p>Emeraldkitty–that list is pretty off. Marian County in CA has an average property tax of $5233 on a $912,000 house. That same house in our area would have over $12,000 in property taxes. I would say that their property taxes are very LOW if they are only paying about .5% of the value. I WISH we only paid that.</p>
<p>I think $12K on a 900K house is a good deal. I’m in the Albany NY area and we pay $8K on a home assessed at $260K. It’s about 1800 sq feet (including the finished basement) on 1/3 acre.</p>
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<p>Property taxes in California are around 1% of assessed value. However, the effect of a law called Proposition 13 means that the assessed value is capped at 1.02^N * P, where N is the number of years since the property was last sold, and P is the sale price at that time. This obviously benefits long term property owners who owned through periods of real estate price inflation.</p>
<p>Proposition 13 was the death knell of the California Public School System, ranked #1 nationally in the 1960’s, and plummeting towards the bottom ever since.</p>
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<p>please keep in mind the Prop 13 in California. When you say AVERAGE you are including those hold on to their house for life and those “new comers”. So, if the house was bought for $100K 40 years ago who have not sold and now worth $2million, the owner will pay property tax based on $100K plus two percent increase per year. So, while the Average of the home is 950K, the property tax base is diluted from those who owned their house for a long time. Had you bought a Marin County house in 2012 for 950K, the property tax would have been around $13-15,000, depends on the special assesments in that location.</p>
<p>120x180 lot size (.5 acre), $4200. If we sold it, it would go to ~$6500.</p>
<p>^^cross posted with ucb…</p>
<p>While the “property tax” is 1% in Cal. based on the purchase price. There are a lot of “add-ons” I am looking at the tax bill: There is the 1% but added taxes are: School unified, school comm coll, Wahsington twp hosp, BART, regional park and water, total tax rate 1.171%, then comes the special assessment of $715.94 making it total tax due
at $6336.74 on an assesed value of $480K</p>
<p>It really does not matter the property size in CA, this house was sold in 2007 for $735K and the Bank foreclosed it at $480K, that is where the tax is assessed at.</p>
<p>I was just going off the numbers listed in that link EK provided. Even at 1%, I WISH. We have all kinds of add on’s too and our taxes are based on the value of the house, not the size of the house.</p>
<p>In Indiana the biggest factor, by far, is size of house. I hate this, as I have a large, poorly built house. Although we are purportedly at “market value” (as a result of a court case), we are truly anything but that. Older homes get the advantage of an excessive amount of depreciation. Two houses with the same market value can pay wildly different taxes. How long someone lives there doesn’t affect it at all.</p>
<p>My brother lived in Indiana.Elkhart county ,I think. Big lot, big house in a gated community next to a golf course. Poor guy, he had a great job & then his company moved to NY. He didn’t want to live in NY, so he brought his wife & child back home to Puget Sound area, where housing was in a bubble. Way overpriced & the sale price for his house in Indiana bought him half as much. But both he & his wife couldn’t imagine sizing down so they spent more than they should and then the bubble popped.
We tried to tell him there is a reason why we were still living in our “starter” house. ;)</p>
<p>“Proposition 13 was the death knell of the California Public School System, ranked #1 nationally in the 1960’s, and plummeting towards the bottom ever since.”</p>
<p>I agree. I am so glad I don’t live in a state that allows propositions on the ballot.</p>