Central Ohio Real Estate Market News

I’ve been a member of the Board’s Tech Users Committee for quite a few years. For the past several years, Joe Testa, the Franklin County Auditor, has spoken to our group during one of the meetings. We always look forward to this session and it’s always well attended.

Joe has been responsible for greatly improving the Auditor’s website making it very informative and extremely user-friendly. He’s very in tune with the necessity to stay on top of technology, and has a great staff of IT people to handle it.

Joe and his staff meet with people to listen to their wants and needs. Meeting with Realtors® is high on his list because we’re such heavy users of the site.

Joe’s site is far better than any of the surrounding county sites. The Delaware County Auditor’s site is next best but doesn’t offer all the extras that Testa’s site does. The remaining surrounding county’s Auditor’s site have a long way to go.

In today’s update, Joe discussed the effect, or non-effect, that the rash of foreclosures will have on the next 3-year property assessment update in 2008. When doing such updates they remove the non-arm’s-length transactions so these special sales (high or low) don’t affect the data for “real” transactions. Foreclosures are not considered an arm’s length transaction thus, would be removed so they don’t negatively affect the assessed value of nearby homes.

Members of the audience questioned how some neighborhoods would be assessed where there were numerous foreclosures that have negatively affected the sale prices of non-foreclosure homes for sale. Joe indicated that they were aware of that issue and might need to review those unique neighborhoods separately.

Joe also discussed the need for all owners of rental properties to register their rentals with the County or face penalties. (read more about this on the site if you’re a landlord). Again, due to the current housing market, some sellers are opting to do lease/purchase on their homes until the market improves. Since those homes are technically a rental until the purchase option is exercised, the homeowner would need to register as well.  

From a Realtor’s® standpoint, one nice program change that the Office is working on is a collaboration with surrounding counties for border streets. There are some streets where the county borders are in the middle of the street. Joe would like to have users move seamlessly from one county’s site to the other county’s in order to check properties on both sides of the street. This improvement may be awhile in coming due to funding, site compatibility and probably politics.

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