Belmont residents worry about tax rate after another jump in property values

BELMONT — Discourse on New Hampshire’s housing crisis often focuses on people priced out of the home-buying market entirely, who can’t afford to buy their first home.

In Belmont, property owners are confronting another face of the crisis, one in which a skyrocketing market overall financially pinches existing homeowners. They feel priced out of their own neighborhoods because value has grown, but — even if they wanted to — couldn’t afford a new house if they sold.

Belmont is not known as a resort town or a hot spot for the towering lakefront second homes that other communities on Winnipesaukee are notorious for. It does, however, have sizable lake frontage on Winnisquam and Silver lakes and, as everywhere, buyers are willing to pay more each year for homes there.

Sharp increases in property evaluations this year, resulting from rising sale prices, led many residents, especially those with waterfront land, to question the accuracy and the fairness of their assessments. 

A petition to the selectboard for reprieve circulated, and residents attended a selectboard meeting in early October to demand answers.

“We’re going to see the taxes go up on these properties no matter what you set for a tax rate,” Linda Normandin, the author of the petition, said to the Belmont Selectboard at its Oct. 4 meeting. “Is that prudent? Is that helpful to the residents that are retired, living on the lake, that worked all their life to save money and be able to enjoy their retirement on the water?”

But, the selectboard responded, there isn’t much the town can do outside of its budget process: the state sets the tax rate and regulates assessors. The appropriate relief available to residents is through abatement.

About 75 residents attended the meeting. They questioned the benefits of doing an assessment annually — something Belmont voters authorized through next year in the town’s 2022 election — and were incredulous that their home values could have increased so much, in several cases more than 200%, in a single year.

Most of the questions people had were regarding decoding how their individual increase came to be — how an aging mobile home in a park would be valued higher than the sticker price on a new one, why waterfront neighborhoods’ values increased so much more than values townwide, and what baseline assessors used to consider properties comparable.

Most of those questions, they were told, can only be answered by an assessor through the abatement process. 

Residents’ frustrations with their increased property values grew out of broader irritation with the forces of the housing market. They worried that new, wealthier buyers would increase home costs so much that existing owners could no longer afford their tax bills.

“There’s one family that’s been on the lake for 80 years,” Normandin told the selectboard. “Third and fourth generation. They're struggling to see how they’re going to retain that property that’s been in their family forever.”

A higher property value does not necessarily mean a higher tax bill, Belmont Town Administrator Alicia Jipson emphasized to residents. 

Tax rates are set at a price per $1,000 of property value. The rate is calculated by the DRA using the assessed value of property townwide and the total amount of money the town must raise through taxes, including money that must be paid to the county and the state. The tax rate can go down when budgets decrease, or when the value of property townwide increases without a major budget hike. For some owners, the tax rate may shrink in greater proportion than their home value grew, giving them a smaller bill.

Belmont residents won’t know whether their climbing home values will mean a higher tax bill until the town’s tax rate is set. They’ll then have until March to file an abatement if they feel their assessment is wrong. 

Regardless of whether their individual taxes will go up, the sticker shock of higher property values tapped into growing anxieties about the affordability of the region.

“There are a lot of people moving here that are able to spend a lot of money,” said Greene, when asked at the educational meeting about waterfront prices. Greene is involved in setting tax rates at the state level.

“There’s nothing any one of us can do about it if someone buys a property next door to you [for an inflated price], whether it’s on the water or anywhere else. And when that happens, your assessment goes up.

“Market value is what a willing buyer and a willing seller can agree to.”