Wednesday, January 18, 2006

LAKEWOOD'S REVALUATION

MAYOR LICHTENSTEIN
AND TOWNSHIP COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Singer, Coles, Cunliffe & Miller
January 16th, 2006

RE: Lakewood’s Real Estate Revaluation.

Dear Mayor & Committee members,

There are numerous errors in the methods and conclusions of the Realty Appraisal that was done for Lakewood Township properties.

They were not familiar enough with the current zoning ordinance which resulted in wrong valuations to be placed on properties, some too high and others too low.

They were also unaware of the different markets in Lakewood Township even within the same condominium development which resulted in wrong assessments to be placed.

They were not sufficiently in tune to the current market conditions which was on the way down at the time of the revaluation’s effective date of I believe October 1st, 2005.

It would be shameful after all of the dollars spent & we still don’t have affair nor correct revaluation of the Lakewood properties.

Very likely this may result in a very large number of appeals to be filed which may put a question mark on the validity of the revaluation.

May I suggest that the Revaluation should be put into effect for the year 2007, and during the course of 2006 we “tweak” those properties that need adjustments. We may have to bring in another appraiser to work along with the reval Co. & the Assessor to tweak those numbers.

Note: This has been done in other Municipalities e.g. Rutherford among others.

Thank you,

Yehuda Shain

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

i a a tax payer and the reevaluation was out of order , and the timing , people in the tax office advised sorry you cant do any thing about it....