The NJ Tax Blog

“In a state where the major burden of paying for government services falls to the property tax, New Jersey bears the unenviable distinction of having the highest property taxes in the country. Over the last five years, the average state property tax has increased 30 percent.

Since housing values have started to drop, some homeowners are balking that they are now paying too much — based on inflated property assessments made at the height of the real estate boom — and are now asking the assessor to come back for another look.”

This quote was written in yesterday’s New York Times in an article by Joseph Elliott titled “Homeowners Fight Back as Market Cools Off.”

According to the article, “property reassessments took place every 10 years on average. But with the rapid rise in real estate values in the first half of this decade, the process spun into warp speed in some hot markets. Since 2000, 272 of New Jersey’s 566 municipalities have undergone revaluations.”

However, as recognized by this article, many of these municipalities that have put in place reassessment or revaluation programs (at a cost of up to $2 million per municipality), are now facing a serious dilemma: A municipality may choose to ignore the current drop in real estate values and implement the reassessment or revaluation that was used with sales data from a year ago, or a municipality may scratch any revaluation or reassessment work that has been done thus far in order to start over in order to take into account the recent drop in real estate prices.

For the full article by Joseph Elliott with the New York Times, please click HERE.

“Sales of large commercial buildings have dropped nationally, but the downswing in north-central New Jersey has been particularly chilly.” - Maura Webber Sadovi in today’s Wall Street Journal (please click here for the article.)

According to the article, sales of commercial, industrial, and multi-tenant properties that are valued in excess of $5 million, have fallen by more than 75% since the fourth quarter of 2006. The article states that one of the primary reasons sales of commercial real estate in New Jersey have all but stopped is the fact that commercial rents in New Jersey have not increased as much as rents in nearby Manhattan.

Office vacancies for the fourth quarter of 2007, as stated by the article, stood at a whopping 17.8%.