Land Case Studies
*Our large portfolio property owner with assets all over California gave us a few properties to ‘test’ this year to see the quality of our service before they
assigned everything over to us. We were able to negotiate a reduction in only 2 months for a 300+ acre vacant parcel in Fremont (Alameda County) and a 50 acre parcel in Madera County to achieve roughly 20% reductions on each property. This translates to annual savings of $50,000 for the two parcels and, as you can imagine, we will be working on the balance of our client’s portfolio this year. Our proven system works in a similar fashion to the way the County
Assessor’s office determines the value of raw land, though we research all the aspects that would impact the value (for example: wetlands, fees, improvement costs, and more) that can reasonably be adjusted from comparable properties in the market.
assigned everything over to us. We were able to negotiate a reduction in only 2 months for a 300+ acre vacant parcel in Fremont (Alameda County) and a 50 acre parcel in Madera County to achieve roughly 20% reductions on each property. This translates to annual savings of $50,000 for the two parcels and, as you can imagine, we will be working on the balance of our client’s portfolio this year. Our proven system works in a similar fashion to the way the County
Assessor’s office determines the value of raw land, though we research all the aspects that would impact the value (for example: wetlands, fees, improvement costs, and more) that can reasonably be adjusted from comparable properties in the market.
*Our developer client with 16 acres of vacant land in Orinda, CA (Contra Costa County) was able to save over $19,000 this year by engaging Pacific Union Property Advisors LLC to prepare a Property Tax Appeal on their behalf and negotiate a reduction. We reduced the Assessed Value from $4.6MM to $2.6MM, which reflects a reduction of 43% in the Assessed Value. Our proven system was able to gather comparable sales of vacant land and finished lot sales in the area in order to determine a fair market value for our client’s property. The trick with this property was that our client was pursuing entitlements for a subdivision and we worked with the County to determine what the unimproved land was worth in today’s market with the potential for future development.
*A developer client of ours owns 45 finished lots in Galt (Sacramento County) that we researched and then prepared an assessment appeal for the 2010/2011 tax roll. Since there were not many sales in the immediate vicinity, we researched sales of finished lots in the Sacramento and Modesto markets. Our analysis included adjustments for the finished home prices in those markets and adjustments for the location to determine the land residual value for our client’s lots. We saved our client over $15,000 for their 2010/2011 tax bill as well as their 2011/2012 tax bill.
