Delaware County residents: you may have noticed, over the past year, white vans trolling the residential streets and taking pictures of houses. Don’t worry, they weren’t casing the neighborhood. Although you could have another reason to worry, as those pictures are the first layer of information to be gathered toward the goal of a county wide property reassessment. The data is till being collected and will be collated for the 2021 tax year. So you still have some time before any changes take place. The pictures are designed to not only replace the poor quality (relative to what can be captured today) images that the county has on file, as well as to correct any inconsistencies in addresses which will be useful for emergency service calls.
While there was recently a person posing as a tax assessor in order to gain entry into people’s homes, be assured that images will only be of the exterior, will not include any homeowners or other people in them and the data collection will not entail access to the interior of your home. Furthermore, the white vans will be clearly marked as the property of Tyler Technologies, Inc., the company supplying the images.
Many of the more northern townships including Haverford, Radnor and Marple have already been photographed and the southern boroughs should be completed within the next year and a half. So how can you predict whether your taxes will go up or down? The prevailing theory is that certain townships are underassessed, including Radnor, where the estimate is that properties are assessed, on average, at 79% of their value. Others, especially near the industry-heavy airport corridor are said to be paying taxes at roughly 150% of value. Part of the issue is that different communities appreciate or depreciate at different rates over time, which is why these reassessments are crucial to maintain a “fair” tax balance. The county expects that there will be residents who would like to appeal whatever their new assessments are, and have indicated they will be prepared with a hotline set up so that residents can learn about the procedure. To find out more, call the Reassessment Hotline at (610) 891-5695.
