Next Week Homeowners Will Receive Updated Property Valuations From County Assessors
Here's some guidance on how to appeal your home's valuation, which will be the basis of property taxes for 2025 and 2026
NOTE: This article is written for homeowners in the City & County of Denver. Click on these links if your home is in another metro county: Jefferson County / Aurora/Adams County / Douglas/Arapahoe County
During the first week of May in every odd numbered year, Colorado’s county assessors are required to inform every property owner of the full valuation that they have assigned to each property. Unless revised downward in the appeal process, that valuation will be the basis of the property tax charged for this year and for 2026.
The valuation you receive by letter is the assessor’s best guess as to what your property might have sold for on June 30th of the previous (even-numbered) year. That assumes, however, that the size and condition of your home is the same on Jan. 1st of this year and next year as it was last year.
The system actually depends on your participation in correcting the assessor’s valuation, which was the result of a computer-assisted “mass appraisal” system, informed by human analysis of market trends, verified sales data, and neighborhood conditions. Deputy appraisers will, however, read or listen to your appeal of the valuation which their system generated for your home. The bottom line is that you owe it to yourself and to the county to help the assessor come up with the proper valuation for your home.
So how do you do that? For non-residential and commercial properties, which pay roughly four times the property tax per $100,000 valuation, a whole industry has arisen to help property owners (for a fee) to appeal their property tax valuation. Residential taxes are so much lower than commercial taxes in Colorado that there’s not enough profit for professionals to make, leaving residential homeowners to appeal on their own for lower valuations.
The county assessors are expected to make it easy for taxpayers to determine whether the assessor guessed correctly at their home’s value as of June 30, 2024.
First, find your home at https://property.spatialest.com/co/denver#/. Note that after you enter your address, you need to scroll down and click on your home’s address.
On your home’s web page look for “Neighborhood Sales” (at the right, under the second ‘More’ tab) which lists all the qualified sales that occurred during the eligible period, the 24 months prior to June 30, 2024.
To make the list of sales useful, click on the “Square Footage” header to find homes similar in size to yours. Once you find good comps to use in your appeal, you need to “time adjust” their sale prices.
Time adjustment is based on how much Denver homes increased in value during those 24 months. The Denver assessor will announce the median percentage increase in values from June 30, 2022, to June 30, 2024, for the City & County, but “median” means that half the neighborhoods will be higher and half will be lower or even negative. Whatever it is for your neighborhood, divide that by 24 months to determine the increase in value per month for residential properties in Denver.
So, if a sale occurred six months prior to June 30, 2024, you need to increase its sale price by six times that monthly rate, and that “time adjusted” price of comps is what you will need to cite in your appeal.
Using the procedure described above, if you find your home was overvalued, you can protest using an online form that is under the “Assessment Protest” tab on your home’s web page, where you can log in as “Guest.”
Your appeal must be postmarked or received by the assessor’s office by June 9, 2025. You can mail or fax your protest, but I recommend an in-person meeting, which you can request by calling 720-913-4164.
If your protest is rejected, the appeal options are explained on the Notice of Valuation letter which you will have received in the mail and on the rejection letter which you will received on or about August 15th.
Remember, above all, the intention is to determine what your home was worth on June 30, 2024, not what it is worth today! Your taxes for 2025 and 2026 will only be based on what it was worth back then!