By Dan Murphy
When I heard last year that a sound shore mansion with a property tax bill of $200,000 per year was attempting to seek a tax certiorari, or reduction, I decided to start looking into Westchester properties that have a property tax bill of $100,000 or more.
That $100,000 figure is the same amount that some Westchester families make… if they are lucky; most Westchester residents make less than the six-figure property taxes that many of the rich and famous in our county pay.
Last week, The Journal News ran a story on a property in Larchmont, at 1 Beach Ave., directly on the Long Island sound waterfront. The property was highlighted in LoHud because it has only had three owners in 105 years.
The story mentioned the price, $5.85 million, and the listing agent, Pollena Forsman of Houlihan Lawrence. It did not mention the property taxes. So we looked it up – $93,459. And the monthly mortgage works out to $22,943.
A friend of ours in the real estate business told us that for every $1 million in a Westchester home’s property value, the property tax bill ranges from $25,000 to $30,000.
The range in property taxes depends upon what town, village or city you live in. The taxes also vary because of the different evaluation rate that Westchester local governments use to set their local and school property taxes.
So for the Larchmont home mentioned above, at almost $6 million, the property has a $93,000 tax bill, which works out to less than $16,000 per million – quite the deal, according to our real estate friend.
In the weeks ahead, we will highlight other multi-million-dollar properties to analyze their tax bill and compare them to other Westchester communities.
Another recent Westchester luxury home that we wrote about was the former home of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, owned by his ex-girlfriend, Sandra Lee. That home has been reduced more than once, in an attempt to secure a sale, from $2 million to $1.59 million. The taxes on the New Castle home are $38,000 – close to the average property tax rate for a Westchester home of that value.
Actress Glen Close recently sold her Bedford home for $2.75 million. Close also reduced the price of her 5,700-square-foot, 11-acre home from $3.6 million to complete the sale. Property taxes are $68,000 per year.
That is another reason we will highlight luxury homes with high tax bills – because prices are being reduced and the properties are apparently getting harder to sell. The reason? Those sky-high property taxes are no longer 100 percent tax-deductible.
Under the new Trump tax code passed two years ago, only the first $10,000 of a Westchester homeowner’s property taxes and state taxes can be deducted. This means that for families paying that $90,000 property tax bill, only $10,000 is deductible, while only three years ago it was 100 percent deductible.
Send us your thoughts, or a home in your neighborhood with a property tax bill that exceeds or is lower than our average of $25,000 per million in value to dmurphy@risingmediagroup.com
