HANOVER — When Carol Weingeist opened the new property tax assessment statement for her home on the east side of town last month, the numbers were jarring.
“I freaked out,” recalled Weingeist, a retired Kendal at Hanover administrator and small business owner.
The notice from the Hanover assessor’s office showed that the assessed value of her 1967 ranch-style home with four bedrooms and two baths had more than doubled in just a few years to $817,000, up from $389,000 in 2018.
But while Weingeist’s own assessment was shocking, what she would later learn about the town’s valuations for neighboring properties left her baffled.
Assessments for homes behind her on Kingsford Road that are larger or had extensive renovations did not increase at nearly the same rate.
“I have three or four neighbors, all retired, who started talking to each other. ‘Did you see this?’ ‘What’s going on?’ ” Weingeist recalled. “The inconsistency is bizarre.”
Although Hanover, like Norwich and Lyme, is known as a moneyed enclave in the Upper Valley, some homeowners say new assessments make them wonder whether they can afford their rising property taxes.
Resident Anne Hill said her Lebanon Road home on the outskirts of downtown was assessed at $462,000 when she bought it for $570,000 in 2017. Four years later, the assessed value has more than doubled to $1,087,500.
Her property tax bill had already increased from $10,024 in 2017 to $15,490 in 2020.
Hill, a self-employed attorney and single mom, worries she can’t afford another big tax hike.
Her options are “to dip into retirement to pay taxes” or “sell the house when my son leaves” for college next year, Hill said. “That’s the reality.”
For the second time in as many assessment cycles, Hanover’s valuation of properties is unsettling many homeowners, who have flooded the assessor’s office seeking explanation.
Compelled by the raft of complaints, Hanover officials last week suspended meetings with property owners so the town could re-analyze the statistical model used to crunch the data behind the assessed values.
The decision by the town’s assessing department follows a petition filed in August with the state’s Board of Tax and Land Appeals by a group of Hanover property owners.
They contend the town’s methodology to determine assessments is “irredeemably flawed,” yielding head-scratching discrepancies for homes just doors apart.
The petitioners are led by veteran Upper Valley real estate agent Bruce (Buff) McLaughry and resident Richard Joseph, who also organized the initial protest and petition drive two years ago that led the state appeals board to order a redo of Hanover’s 2018 townwide assessment.
Joseph said the town’s do-over continues to show that “many of the problems from the (initial 2018) revaluation had not been fixed.”
The 2021 assessments — often referred to as a “revaluation” — were generated with the help of Vision Government Solutions, a Massachusetts company that designs assessing software for municipalities.
Hanover had contracted with Vision until 2017, when the town switched vendors.
Vision’s software and database under the prior contract had been “relatively consistent” and was adjusted with 24 months of homes sales data from spring of 2019 to spring of 2021, the assessor’s office said, which includes 2020 when there was a steep, pandemic-driven rise in home prices across the Upper Valley.
Overall, the analysis found that Hanover’s grand list — the estimated value of all property in town — rose 15.1% to $2.67 billion from the revised 2018 grand list total of $2.32 billion.
The residential sector rose at a slightly higher rate of 17%.
“What this means as a taxpayer is if your new assessment is either up or down more than 15% you would likely see a corresponding increase or decrease in your final tax bill this fall,” the assessor told residents in a letter sent out with the new assessment on Aug. 11.
Last year, Hanover hired Norm Bernaiche, a veteran Upper Valley assessor, after the prior assessor resigned following the backlash over the town’s 2018 property revaluation.
Bernaiche acknowledged in an interview last week that the many requests for meetings from property owners and the petition to the state board compelled officials to review the methodology employed in calculating the revaluations.
“The most important thing is that taxpayers are heard and have the opportunity prior to the tax rate being set to have their assessment reviewed if they ask,” Bernaiche said. “We always look for … a systemic issue.”
He said the town so far had conducted about 120 “informal reviews” of preliminary assessments but hit pause on the remaining 25 or so requests from property owners.
(An informal review occurs after new assessments are issued but before the new tax bills are issued; a “formal review” is a petition for an abatement after tax notices are sent in the fall.)
In the meantime, the assessing department — in consultation with Vision — is reviewing the assessing software to determine if it requires tweaking.
Bernaiche said he asked the state for an extension on the Sept. 1 deadline when the town is required to file its townwide assessment with the Department of Revenue Administration, which sets the tax rate for New Hampshire municipalities.
He said he still expects tax bills will be sent out on time this year, usually in November. Taxes are due Dec. 1.
John Hayes, a Concord attorney who specializes in property taxes and is the former general counsel at the state’s Department of Revenue Administration, characterized the back-to-back petitions from angry property owners to the state as “fairly unusual.”
“When you have discrepancies in the data, it gets a lot of people upset,” Hayes said.
He said that although it can be expected that a townwide revaluation will include “some homes that are under-assessed and some homes that are over-assessed” due to the large amount of data, the issue before the BTLA and DRA will turn on “how widely they vary” outside the statistical norm.
Exactly how much home prices have increased in Hanover in recent years depends on the source.
For example, the median sales price for a single-family residence in Hanover increased 22.5% from $595,000 in 2015 to $728,5000 in 2020, according to New Hampshire Realtors, the trade association representing the state’s real estate industry.
But Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Realty, which handles many of the premier real estate sales in region, reports that the median sales price in 2021 has hovered around $1 million.
At the core of the taxpayer petition is the claim that the Hanover assessing department overvalued the land portion of the assessment while minimizing building values. (A property assessment is composed of two values, one assigned to land and one assigned to the building).
The petitioners contend that the assessing department relied upon too small a pool of home sales to estimate land values.
As a result, the assessments for properties on the same street appear distorted in relation to the condition of the homes; The petition cites “larger, more updated and grand homes” on Conant Road that saw their total assessments rise between 20% to 33% while “the more modest and more depreciated homes” on the same street had assessments increase between 70% to 120%.
“That’s a problem,” the petition said.
Joseph, the co-lead petitioner, said the priority for taxpayers is to assure that all properties are assessed at a consistent standard.
“The town’s model calculated assessments for numerous modest houses such that their assessments doubled when assessments for neighboring, more expensive homes only increased 20% or so,” Joseph said.
While assessment challenges are often framed by some people as an anti-tax protest, Joseph said that is not supported by the data in this case.
“The model created enormous inequities and it is homeowners of the more modest houses that really got hammered. Frequently, those are the people who can least afford it,” he said.
While acknowledging the methodology may need to be adjusted, Bernaiche, Hanover’s assessor, appeared to caution against the expectation that it would lead to wholesale revisions of assessments.
“The overall analysis looks OK, but we’re finding that potentially the land was a little high and the building was a little low. But that doesn’t mean the total was wrong,” he said, adding that “a lot of folks won’t see a change but some will … I’ve told the petitioners I’m not going to finish it until I finish it.
“Not everyone is going to agree with us. It never happens.”
Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.
