High price of owning property
The front of Herman Sauritch's home in Charleroi
Herman Sauritch, outside the Charleroi home he shares with his Shih Tzus Gizmo and Sky, questions how Tyler Technologies Inc. arrived at the $44,800 value assigned to his property.
Herman Sauritch is 75 years old, but this is the first time since becoming a homeowner decades ago that he’s had to deal with a property reassessment.
This spring, Washington County landowners received new property values for the first time since 1981. Sauritch then lived in Belle Vernon, Fayette County, which assessed in 1954 and 2001.
After his mother moved to be with her daughter in Maine in the mid-1990s, Sauritch moved back to Charleroi, to the Prospect Avenue home in which he grew up. His father, World War II veteran John Sauritch, purchased a five-room house clinging to a steep hillside in 1947, and Herman Sauritch obtained a $20,000 home equity loan to add central air conditioning, install a new furnace and replace the windows, along with other remodeling he and his son tackled. It’s still a five-room house with an eat-in kitchen and living room on the second floor and two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs that Zillow.com states was built in 1915.
“I busted my butt 20 years ago to fix the house up,” Sauritch said. “Back in the ’50s to the early ’80s, this was the best town in the Valley to grow up in. Charleroi was the shopping hub of the whole Mon Valley. Now, it’s depressing as hell.”
The economy of the Mon Valley has changed drastically due to plant, mill and mine closings, so Sauritch was shocked when he opened the envelope containing a letter stating the value of his home for tax purposes and saw it had been set at $44,800.
“That assessment, there is no part of reality that entered into it,” Sauritch said. “I want them to show me what criteria they used to determine $44,800.” Zillow.com places the median value of homes in Washington County at $131,800, meaning half of the total number of homes are valued higher and the rest are valued lower.
Also in Sauritch’s mail was a postcard from a Western Pennsylvania law firm known for its commercials offering to handle debt relief and bankruptcy, but this pitch was geared toward lowering one’s property reassessment.
“Like I’m going to go hire lawyers to go fight this assessment,” Sauritch grumbled. With the reassessment, information about each tax parcel has been placed online so each property owner can research comparable properties, but Sauritch said he doesn’t have the technological know-how to tackle this task.
Bradley Boni, Washington County chief assessor, said he can’t comment on an individual property value, but, in an email, he wrote “the county’s property records public access site was built so property owners could readily access all of the data necessary to present a case. For property owners who aren’t as web-savvy, we’ve talked them through matters over the phone, or we’ve instructed them to come in and gather data from one of our public computer terminals. From there, property owners can piece together their own case, and that’s not something that we consult them on.”
Sauritch did schedule what Tyler Technologies has called an “informal review” in the Chapman Building in Washington, jokingly telling the hearing officer that if she paid him $40,000 for his house, he’d throw in his two Shih Tzus.
The interviewer asked him to name the figure for which he thought his house would sell. Sauritch said he replied, “If I tried to sell this house for $20,000, that would be it, but it would be without Gizmo and Sky,” his dogs.
He has assembled some information about property prices on his street. A vacant house two doors away had a “for sale” sign out front, and Sauritch said a friend expressed an interest in it. The friend planned to offer $3,500, but he was unable to discuss his offer. A few days later, the real estate agent was removing the sign, and Sauritch said he asked why. She told him, he said, that the property sold for “$500 and $500 in back taxes.”
A neighbor put his home on the market, asking $25,000 four years ago but selling it for $17,000, Sauritch said.
Sauritch, a divorced father of six, is now retired after working at the wire mill in Monessen, American Chain and Cable, Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel’s Allenport plant and the RockTenn partition plant. “I have a $300-a-month pension and Social Security,” he said. One thing he does have is time to attend an informal review.
“This whole process defies logic so much. I just wanted to go there and see what was going on,” he said, telling his girlfriend before driving to Washington for his reassessment informal review, “I’m liable to end up in jail.”
No incarceration resulted, but Sauritch went away without answers on how Tyler Technologies arrived at the value it placed on his home. It’s a question many may be pondering.
Tyler’s 2013 proposal to reassess property in Washington County “contains trade secret information on Tyler’s methodologies, detailed approach and best practices that are confidential and proprietary to Tyler Technologies, CLT Appraisal Services and has been redacted. … The information contained in this subsection is a trade secret as defined in Pennsylvania’s Right-To-Know Law and is therefore exempt for public records requests,” was a response to the Observer-Reporter’s request to examine the contract.
Also excluded from an examination of the contract and proposal was information about what is called the “iasWorld” software package that Tyler uses to determine the value of properties. Although county officials had their information technology department look at this information, it’s not something that’s generally available to an outsider.
Informal reviews began March 28, and, according to Boni, there were slightly more than 12,000 informal reviews scheduled through April. Washington County has approximately 120,000 property parcels, so the number of reviews reflect about 10 percent. Although the bulk of the reviews are conducted Monday through Friday during daytime hours, Tyler has also offered evening and Saturday appointments, a practice that will last through May.
People do not leave the proceedings with an answer about their property’s value.
Those who have had informal reviews will learn in July what the final number will be.
“Pay very close attention,” Boni cautioned. “It could be the same. It could be different.”
If the property owner thinks that value is still too high, he or she can request a hearing before a board of assessment appeals.
“If I come for a formal hearing, everything is on me,” Sauritch said. “I’m not going to pay some real estate person to come and assess this place. It borders on the ridiculous. The whole part about real estate is location, location, location.
“I’m just hoping some common sense will come out of this.”
Formal appeals are to be placed on a schedule by Wednesday, Aug. 10, and the hearings before a board of assessment appeals are to be heard by Oct. 31. The bottom line for property owners is likely to be the tax levy associated with new property values.
Washington County is to certify new property values by Nov. 15.
“From that point, the county can formally begin the process of changing tax rates,” Boni said.
The Washington County reassessment grew out of a 2008 court case brought by the Washington and McGuffey school districts. The board of commissioners reluctantly agreed to begin a reassessment when they ran out of legal options in August 2013.