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Every news organization in Dallas plays catch up with the Observer. Marvelous I tell you. Simply Marvelous.

Hey Sam, question for you....

Help me out here, but doesn't DCAD seem a little off? As in, a tad crooked or not exactly playing by the rules?

If all this property downtown has been so undervalued for years, then how much money has been lost by this? Why have the homeowner's in this city, including myself, been shouldering the burden for so long?

Shouldn't someone be questioning the methodology of DCAD?

You and I don't agree on the convention center, but this has certainly made things more interesting.

Thanks for the update.

All of these downtown landowners will send in the usual guys to appeal the valuations and get the taxable value down to last years level. All they have to do is bring in documentation about foreclosures in the area and DCAD will relent. I do this every year for my residential property and my value has remained the same for 4 years now.

I tell everyone in my neighborhood to protest DCAD values to keep our taxes low. If you are one of those people that takes pride in your taxes going up because your home has "gained value" according to DCAD; try and sell your house to DCAD... I will pass along one of the most important things I ever learned in my college real estate fundamentals class. Protest the taxable value every year.

ellum08:

You’re right; if these appraisals are correct, then the city has been getting robbed of millions of tax dollars. However, most (if not all) of the downtown landowners have tax attorneys and will be contesting the new valuations, as El Rey pointed out.

The only way to really get a feel for this situation is after the cases have been heard and all of the valuations are finalized. Much like the convention center hotel issue, this is an ongoing story.

I took a look at a lot of these DCAD valuations and find it pretty hard to believe that Downtown land values were stagnant (0% growth rate) from 1999 - 2007, as DCAD would have us believe; meanwhile, residential property values throughout the city during that same period, 1999 - 2007, escalated 86%. As a side note, the taxable value of Belo's corporate headquarters actually DECREASED during the same period.

This is really, really, really hard to understand.