By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews.com
One week after Lincoln County voters got their Nov. 2 ballot in the mail, there’s another important envelope arriving this weekend – your 2021 property tax bill.
Lincoln County mailed 45,738 property tax statements on Thursday with the first payment due Nov. 15.
Total property taxes, fees and special assessments are up approximately 3.2 percent over last year, said Lincoln County Assessor Joe Davidson.
Full payments made by Nov. 15 get a 3 percent discount and two-thirds payments get a 2 percent discount. At least one-third payment must be received by Nov. 15 to avoid delinquent interest charges. For property owners making one-third payments, the second payment is due by Feb. 15, 2022, and the third payment by May 15, 2022.
Davidson said two-thirds of accounts are usually paid by the November due date, including 9,500 paid automatically by banks holding a residential mortgage.
The county gets the bulk – 71.5 percent – of all property taxes it collects from single-family residences. Commercial property accounts for 13.4 percent.
The total being levied is $129.6 million, which is then distributed to 76 local taxing districts, including education and hospital districts, cities, the county, port, fire, water and road districts and urban renewal districts adopted by cities.
Very hot real estate market
While painful to most people, the property tax statements are also a reasonable indicator of what’s going on in the real estate market – even though those indicators are a year behind actual real estate sales.
The market was hot in 2020 and is hotter so far this year.
Davidson said the overall, countywide increase in sales prices of residential properties increased by almost 10 percent in 2020. That compares with a 6 percent increase in 2019 and a 9 percent increase in 2018.
The sale prices of oceanfront or river properties jumped 14-15 percent in 2020, he said.
“Residential sales are hotter than we’ve seen in many years,” Davidson said. “It was a spike in the rate of increase this year.”
The number of home sales in Lincoln County has been on a steady rise since 2011 and is showing no signs of slowing down.
There were nearly 2,400 residential sales in 2020, more than double the number in 2011.
During the first six months of 2020, there were 937 home sales in Lincoln County, Davidson said. During the first six months of this year there were 1,364.
“That’s a 45 percent increase in the number of sales for the same time last year,” Davidson said. “If we continue at that rate we’ll be at the 2004-05 pace” when 3,200 to 3,400 homes were sold.
The hot market was also reflected in the median sale price of single-family home in the county last year. The countywide media was $299,000 in 2020, according to the county’s data, a $9,000 jump over 2019 and the highest in the last 20 years.
There were 70 sales of commercial properties in 2020, with an overall price increase from 2019 of 10-12 percent countywide. Most of those sales were retail stores, restaurants and hotels in Newport, Lincoln City and Waldport, Davidson said.
Have questions? Just call
Most property owners will see a typical 3 percent increase in their assessed value due to Measure 50 – a constitutional amendment approved by Oregon voters in 1997. The most common exception to that limit is new construction or re-development of property.
Most property taxes are a product of assessed values and underlying district tax rates. Along with changes in assessed values, voter-approved levies may impact total taxes in certain areas of the county, Davidson said.
For the 2020-21 tax year, just one local option levy was approved in the county – the renewal of a local option levy for the Central Oregon Coast Fire & Rescue District in the Waldport-Tidewater and Five Rivers area. For the fourth straight year there were no school, hospital district, port or fire district bonds up for a vote.
Davidson said a common misperception is that property owners have to file an appeal in order to get an adjustment. Davidson said people can work with the assessor’s staff to get data to show real market data or to correct errors and possibly do value reductions by Dec. 31.
In 2017 the Board of Property Tax Appeals heard 130 appeals; in 2019 it was 64 and just 46 in 2020.
Davidson said calling first to talk or making an appointment to visit the assessor’s office in the county courthouse has helped decrease the number of appeals. Staff can explain issues or correct mistakes, he said, and sometimes a problem can be resolved by a visit to the property by an appraiser.
But adjustments need to be made by Dec. 31.
“I highly encourage anyone to call us,” he said. “If you have questions, we have staff in place to answer them.”
