ADA COUNTY, Idaho — In Ada County, there is a lot of conversation surrounding home prices and property assessments. The 2021 assessments were recently sent out in Ada County, and homeowners are seeing a big increase in assessed values. That's attributed to a number of factors.
Bob McQuade has served as Ada County assessor since 1995. He sat down with KTVB on Tuesday to give insight on the current market and to answer questions we've been getting from homeowners.
Since he began working as assessor, McQuade says assessments on properties have certainly changed and recent months have shown some of the most dramatic changes. So, why have assessments been so volatile?
“It changes because by statute, we have to be at market value as of January 1st. So what we do is we will look at all the sales that occurred last year, in 2020, and we'll bring those sales prices up to a current value, time trended according to time, up to a value as of January 1st,” McQuade said.
The assessments done on Ada County properties are a market-based assessment, not a random equation or evaluation.
“I've been accused of being arbitrary just picking numbers,” McQuade said. “It's a very tight process on how we determine what the value is going to be and they really yield fairly accurate representations of the value as of January 1st.”
With recent jumps in property assessments, questions are being asked about what factors go into an assessments. A major driver is what homes in the area were bought and sold for.
“On new homes, we will go out and take a look and see what the quality of the construction is like, the style of the home, use a cost approach on that initial assessment, but after that we use the market approach," McQuade said. "What we will do is - we will look at sales in the neighborhood. We compare those sales, we will trend them up to January 1st, we will compare those values to the value a year earlier. We'll say if there is a 20% difference if they're 20% higher than in a particular area, we will increase those values by 20%.”
A great resource powered by the assessor's office is their website and information dashboard. On it you can search assessed property values from over the years, searchable by address. Important information like property size features and history is all available on the site. Ada County also has a step-by-step breakdown of how the entire process works.
“It just really gives people an understanding what's been going on, and it's very transparent and you can look at your property," McQuade said. "I know people who will look at their property, they look at all of the neighbors around them to see if they're being treated fairly.”
So, how can property assessments be increasing by the percentages they are. McQuade says there are several factors.
"The first, I would say, the low interest rates are having a significant impact on this," he said. "When people go to buy a house they don't say, I can afford a $400,000 house, they think what can I afford for my monthly payment and as interest rates have come down, you can afford a much larger mortgage. So that's a certainly a significant factor.
Another factor is that we have a lot of people moving into the area from the West Coast, from California and Oregon and Washington, and other areas where there's been significant increases in value over many years. These people are coming with cash and they get into cash bidding wars. That certainly has a significant influence."
McQuade says the current situation really isn’t comparable to anything he has ever seen firsthand in Ada County.
"No, it's not, there's nothing to compare it to at all and I don't see a collapse in housing prices either. Right now, I just don't see the makings there,” McQuade said.
Join 'The 208' conversation:
- Text us at (208) 321-5614
- E-mail us at the208@ktvb.com
- Join our The 208 Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/the208KTVB/
- Follow us on Twitter: @the208KTVB or tweet #the208 and #SoIdaho
- Follow us on Instagram: @the208KTVB
- Bookmark our landing page: /the-208
- And we also turn each episode into a podcast on Podbean
- Still reading this list? We're on YouTube, too: