Glen Cove’s Residential Assessment Ratio Reduced – What it Means to You

On March 19, 2018, SCAR Hearing Officer Betsy Rosenblum conducted a hearing to determine the ratio for the City of Glen Cove for the 2018/2019 tax year. Representing the petitioner as hearing counsel was Martin E. Valk, lead attorney of the firm’s Tax Certiorari practice group.

Ratio, simply put, is the percentage by which the assessor divides the assessment to determine the market value of a particular property. Since at least 2009, the City of Glen Cove measured its ratio at 1.0, which means that a home assessed at 494,500 held a market value of $494,500.

In her decision, Hearing Officer Rosenblum determined ratio to be .9545, or approximately 4.5% less than Glen Cove’s assertions. The Hearing Officer based her decision on the determination of the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance’s Office of Real Property Tax Services that “underlying sales data must be adjusted to reflect for time of sales, and an appropriate ratio should be arrived at on the basis of time adjusted sales conducted during the full year preceding the valuation date.” The City of Glen Cove did not time-adjust, and increased its assessed values by 6%, even though it stated that the market was flat.

What does the decision mean? Using the prior example, a house assessed at 494,500 would hold an assessed market value of approximately $518,000. In this case, the market demonstrated that comparable sales were actually lower, and therefore the assessment should be reduced.

The full text of the decision is available here:  Glen Cove Ratio