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Property Taxes on Tampa Homes & Condos
August 29th, 2006 categories: Hillsborough Property Tax, Tampa Homes, Tampa Real Estate, Tampa Realtor
Tampa homeowners, for the most part, understand the system of taxation on the value of real property in Hillsborough County, Florida. However, most first time buyers as well as some longtime owners making a move do not understand how it all works. Here’s a simple primer:
When you purchase a new property the county appraiser will place a value on it based on what you paid for it. Each year you will be required to pay taxes for the current year’s value and those taxes will be due on November 30th. So you are paying taxes for the current year at the end of the year. You can delay the payment until May of the following year, but you’ll see an additional fee tacked on for each month of delay. There is a “millage rate” or rate at which you will be taxed. This rate is multiplied by your “assessed value” or the value the property appraiser has given to your property. If you have a mortgage on the property, you will most likely pay a portion of your taxes each month as part of your monthly payment. Your lender will then make the total payment for you. Make sure your lender makes the payment on time.
If the property is your primary residence you may apply for a “homestead exemption”, which has 2 main benefits. Firstly, you’ll get an exemption of $25000 on the assessed value each year. Currently, in Tampa, this equates to about a $562 deduction. More importantly, the amount at which the appraiser can boost your assessed value is limited to 3% per year. So even if property values have skyrocketed, as they recently have, you’ll see only a small increase in taxes.
Many homebuyers will look at what the current resident has recently paid in taxes as an indication of what they will pay going forward. This will not be accurate because the appraiser will re-assess the property at its new value based on the price paid. The best way to estimate taxes on a prospective purchase and to learn more about the system, is to use the appraiser’s property tax estimator. This will give you an estimated range of taxes for help in figuring your monthly payment.
TIP!
When your lender gives you a “good faith estimate” of your monthly payment, make sure the tax estimate is within that range. I see many “GFEs” that use the previous year’s taxes as an estimate. This can be way off the mark and change monthly payments substantially. Never a fun discovery at the closing table!
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