Last weekend my wife and I were watching a YouTube segment by StrongTowns that highlighted how many towns across America seem to scale their property assessments in a way that disproportionately burdens low-income homeowners.
The segment used two hypothetical homes to illustrate this issue. The first home, valued at $100,000, only received $90,000 on sale, while the second, assessed at $1,000,000, sold for $1,200,000. This pattern, when applied across thousands of properties, places an undue tax burden on those with lower-value homes.
I wanted to know if Glastonbury mirrored this trend. This past Sunday I wrote a program that gently walked the Vision Government Solutions website to gather all of the assessed values in Glastonbury. I captured 14,584 different assessed properties in our town through this process.
I reached out to our assistant assessor, Max Camfield. He advised focusing on homes sold between July 1, 2021, and October 1, 2022, comparing these real-world sales figures against the assessed values listed in the Vision system. This approach yielded 811 valid data points.
I had to throw out some cases, such as homes that were passed on to children as an inheritance. These outliers were easy to identify and would skew the data.
The resulting graph is shown below. The middle line shows a home sold at exactly the assessed value (0%), and the lines show what percent over or under the assessed values homes sold for. If a home sold for 10% more than the assessed value, the line would move up to the 10 value for that home. The X access in the graph are the home values.
There are some variances in the data, as some homes will sell for more or less than their assessed values. We see a wider variance of data in lower value of homes – and this is expected. A $10,000 variation is a larger percentage in a $200,000 home compared to a $700,000 one.
The average variance for the last assessment was -0.31%. Meaning assessment to sold values were off by less than a third of a percent!
More importantly, if our assessments were off for specific values of homes, we would see the graph start higher on the left side and trend down as it progressed.
This indicates our town’s assessments align closely with what properties are genuinely worth. I was pleasantly surprised to see the results, and it shows what a great job our assessors do.
In particular I would like to give a shout out to Max Camfield. He patiently answered dozens of questions and replied to every email.
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