News editor mclarkmadison on home appraisals, protesting those appraisals, and how we survive Austin's population boom.
This graph shows the month-by-month increase in the Austin metropolitan statistical area's median home sales prices from March 2021 to March 2022, as tracked by the Austin Board of Realtors. That's a 22% increase. Within the city of Austin, the rate of increase was steeper and the prices higher. Sellers don't need to disclose sales prices to the appraisal district, but the folks there can read the headlines.
Busytown came to a complete halt for a moment last week when the Travis Central Appraisal District dropped its latest property valuations and took the public's breath away.
Do realize also that commercial property owners hire skilled experts to do this for them and almost never, ever, ever fail to get steep reductions on appraised value. People like Paul Bettencourt, who also just happens to write Texas property tax law as a state senator, nice gig.
So what this means for Austin and every other major Texas city that's growing faster than the state as a whole is that they have no choice this summer but to steeply lower their tax rates. The only people who are going to be paying closer to full freight for their ballooning valuations are those who put property on the tax rolls in 2021, so new construction, of which there is a lot in Austin, enough to make its sundry owners an empowered lobbying force at all levels of government.
So can you see how we forge a purple tide here? The way we did in 2018 when Beto O'Rourke, though himself not a victor, propelled enough new Democrats into the Lege and chastened enough MAGAnational Republicans therein to deliver the biggest fix to school finance in 20 years. Then we had a plague and the wackass 2020 cycle and last year's endless Fox News special docuseries that was the 87th Lege, and everyone forgot to keep those swing voters happy.
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