PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia homeowners will get a reprieve from new property assessments, guaranteeing no increase in what they’ll owe in taxes next year.
This pause in new assessments is directly related to the last one — a three-year break, thanks largely to the pandemic. Initially, the pause was to work out the kinks in a new valuation system in 2019, but it continued for two more years because of COVID-19.
But when the city resumed reassessments last year, homeowners were gobsmacked: Property values had risen an average of 31% citywide; 25% of homeowners saw their values double. That prompted some 20,000 requests for the Philadelphia Office of Property Assessment to take a second look, tying up the staff that would have been doing the new assessments.
“The time they would have been putting into evaluations that would have come out in a month or two has been spent on those first-level reviews, so we’re not doing revaluation this year,” explained Finance Director Rob Dubow. “We will continue doing revaluations starting next year.”
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He’s not worried that this one-year pause will cause the same kind of spike the last pause did — not just because it’s a shorter amount of time, but because values are not rising as fast.
“The values that we’re seeing now are even with the values the last time we did evaluations, so that will probably help us in terms of not seeing what we saw when we had a three-year gap,” Dubow added.