Revaluation moving ahead

Completion is near

By: Jessica Beym
   Property inspections for the townshipwide revaluation should be complete in a matter of weeks, but township Tax Assessor Steve Benner said it would be months before new assessments are established.
   Appraisal Systems Inc. of Mendham, the firm hired by the township to conduct the revaluation, began collecting information from all township properties in March, including vacant lots, farms, houses and commercial sites.
   The information will be paired with recent sales and market trends to bring assessments up to the current market value. Cranbury’s last revaluation was in 1986 and the market value of all properties has grown but commercial and residential properties have grown at different rates.
   As of Aug. 10, 960 of the 1,156 homeshouses had been inspected and Mr. Benner expects the rest to be done in the next few weeks. Once the home house inspections are complete, Appraisal Systems Inc. will visit the farm properties, Mr. Benner said.
   In addition, 80 of the 89 vacant lots were inspected as of July 31.
   Commercial property inspections began in July and Mr. Benner said Wednesday that he expects they will be finished by the end of September.
   "Right now, it’s just field work," Mr. Benner said Wednesdayof the progress. "The important information they will be looking at is yet to come. Right now, it has no numbers, just descriptions of the property."
   Gathering information — such as the location of the property, the size of the lot, size of the building or home — is the first step in formulating the new assessments.
   Once the information is collected and entered into the assessor’s system, ASI will develop models for each neighborhood using recent resale information and market trends.
   The models would then be applied to the houses in the respective neighborhood. The assessments are then customized based on the characteristics of each homehouse, Mr. Benner said.
   As the inspectors complete each neighborhood, they will send out notification letters indicating the new proposed assessment. At that time, property owners can make an appointment with ASI to review the new assessment.
   "It is our goal to have the values established and preliminary valuation notices start going out to property owners in mid-November," Mr. Benner said.
   The new assessments, Mr. Benner said, would be certified by January and applied for the 2007 tax year.
   Because information is still being collected and the models have not been developed, Mr. Benner said that it is too soon to speculate how the values would change and how the new assessments could affect taxpayers in 2007.
   The only prediction Mr. Benner has made was in July when, in a letter addressed to the township, Mr. Benner said he was confident the municipality’s total assessed value would double. Currently, it is at $620.326 million.
   Because of this the Township Committee decided to ask voters in November to reduce the township open space tax rate by a penny. Currently, the open space tax rate — which raises money for purchasing, developing and maintaining open space and farmland — is 3 cents per $100 of assessed property.