Opening your eyes to the intricate world of property appraisals and tax rates, we're thrilled to welcome a true authority on the subject, Mike Twitty, the Pinellas County Property Appraiser. With a wealth of experience and deep understanding of the field, Mike offers us a lens into the backstage processes, including decoding the values posted on their website and intricacies of trim notices. But that's not it, he also presents an illuminating post-COVID overview of the value increase for single-family homes over the past two years, something that's reshaping the real estate market in unprecedented ways.
Our conversation takes a turn towards understanding the role of technology in property appraisals. Mike recounts his firsthand experience with the recent website redesign and the unique challenges that accompany such system changes. We delve into the specifics of different mobile home parks and the elusive arena of PACE loans. Ever wondered why these loans are missing from their website or tax bills? Mike has the answers.
The discourse shifts gear as we explore the often-overlooked complexities of homestead exemptions and property taxes. With Mike at the helm, we walk through the process, discuss the consequences of removing homestead from a property before its sale, and the penalties for homestead fraud. Ever thought about establishing trusts to retain homestead benefits? This episode will guide you on the why and how. Mike also explains how to leverage the tax estimator website for a smoother transition into the upcoming tax year. So, tune in as we dissect the multifaceted world of property appraisal and taxes, promising a conversation full of insights and knowledge you can't afford to miss!
Opening your eyes to the intricate world of property appraisals and tax rates, we're thrilled to welcome a true authority on the subject, Mike Twitty, the Pinellas County Property Appraiser. With a wealth of experience and deep understanding of the field, Mike offers us a lens into the backstage processes, including decoding the values posted on their website and intricacies of trim notices. But that's not it, he also presents an illuminating post-COVID overview of the value increase for single-family homes over the past two years, something that's reshaping the real estate market in unprecedented ways.
Our conversation takes a turn towards understanding the role of technology in property appraisals. Mike recounts his firsthand experience with the recent website redesign and the unique challenges that accompany such system changes. We delve into the specifics of different mobile home parks and the elusive arena of PACE loans. Ever wondered why these loans are missing from their website or tax bills? Mike has the answers.
The discourse shifts gear as we explore the often-overlooked complexities of homestead exemptions and property taxes. With Mike at the helm, we walk through the process, discuss the consequences of removing homestead from a property before its sale, and the penalties for homestead fraud. Ever thought about establishing trusts to retain homestead benefits? This episode will guide you on the why and how. Mike also explains how to leverage the tax estimator website for a smoother transition into the upcoming tax year. So, tune in as we dissect the multifaceted world of property appraisal and taxes, promising a conversation full of insights and knowledge you can't afford to miss!
Hello and welcome to the golf coast to space coast podcast at Charles Ruttenberg reality program for you to find out where the rubber meets the road and give you the facts you need to help you navigate the real estate industry out there. So today I am joined by a very special guest. First we have Byron in the booth force over here, but today we have a very special guest. His name is Mike Twitty, the honorable Mike Twitty, your Pinellas County property appraiser. Very humble guy, but I'm going to tell you a little bit about his pedigree. Why, why, how he got to where he is. He's a lifelong resident of Pinellas County. All right, me too, love that.
Speaker 1:I was born and raised here, graduated from Largo High, he went to the best school in the state. He went to the University of Florida don't hate out there with a degree in business administration and majored in real estate and urban analysis. He also, guys, has a Florida real estate brokers license and he also was a state certified general appraiser. That was the perfect segue into his business to what he is today. So his job with the Pinellas County property appraiser, his duly elected official position, is a political job. You got to run for that every four years, don't you? Yes, you do. This guy has the pedigree for the job. He not only knows what he's doing out there, he's done it, and so when he assesses your value on your house, you're going to have a hard time arguing that, aren't you? So with that, I want to turn it over. Mike, thanks for coming back. We appreciate having you here. Thank you, mike. Thanks for having me in. Well, so what is going on? I heard that you just got the values up and yes, yes, so you know.
Speaker 2:It's really important for everybody to understand. Whenever we post our values each year, it's as of a static point in time, so it's always that January one effective date of value.
Speaker 2:So you know when people are out there getting appraisals on their homes, those are typically, you know an as is value as of a current date in most cases. So when you look at our our website, don't think it's you know a current value as of the time you're looking at it. It's always as of typically the most recent January one. However, we just posted our effective January one 2023 values on the website this week. So, because it takes the first half of the year really to get all that stuff together, we have to let all the data come in from the prior year and close the year out, and a lot of that doesn't record until in through the first quarter. You know, to sort it all out, pick up new construction, do all those types of things.
Speaker 1:A lot of parcels out there to get the information on. So so you guys just got the, the trim notices. I guess, right, we call it. Well, no, so what do we call that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the trim notices don't come out until the third week of August, so that's when you get your official trim notice. We we just released what we call the preliminary values. So those are the July one values we certify and send up to the Department of Revenue and we also provided to all the taxing authorities. So they're using that to start doing their budgeting process. So they'll set their, their tentative millage rates, which are their tax rates, right, and then you'll see those on the trim notice by a taxing authority in August. But just so you all know, so the values, you can go check your value that is likely going to be on your trim notice now. So if you you go to the website, you look at your value, you can check your exemptions and if you see something that looks out of line, just call our office because we'll explain whatever we need to explain to you and help walk you through it.
Speaker 1:Perfect. I appreciate that. Now, when you say the different taxing authorities, could you give guys, the listeners out there, a quick idea on what we're talking about when we talk to who's what and where they're at? Sure?
Speaker 2:sure? So taxing authorities are essentially all your. You know, first of all, your 24 different cities and your unincorporated county. Those are all different taxing authorities. We have almost 60 different taxing authorities within Pinellas County. How do you keep all this straight?
Speaker 2:yeah, so all different millage rates, I have a really good staff, because we have to, you know, keep track of all that stuff as well. So, but then you have things like the school board, psta, juvenile welfare board, swift, mud. You know, there's all these other line items that show up on your trim notice. They're on your trim notice. We show everything that's in your tax district. So wherever you live, you're going to have different taxing authority lines and different tax rates based on those authorities. So you know, to keep it simple, the, the equation for a tax bill is basically taxable value, which we determine, times tax rate, which the taxing authorities determine equals tax dollars.
Speaker 1:So just so we're clear, they shouldn't call you when their millage goes up.
Speaker 2:We have nothing to do with millage right, you just set the values. Right, we're following the market. So the market goes up, market goes up. If it goes down, it goes down, and then we administer all the exemptions.
Speaker 1:So we have, wow, a lot of questions, a lot of things going on. So what's going on? I mean we could go back for 20, obviously this year. See where you're. You're going backwards and looking at a time. So what would you say post COVID? We've seen here in 20, 21, 22, just a ballpark in it. What kind of value increase have we seen in those three years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so post COVID, we basically the last two years just value jumped for a single family, the. If you took the median price per square foot of a single family home, it jumped 21% the last two years in a row, which is the two highest on record 21% a piece.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, oh wow.
Speaker 2:Yes, now it. That's. That's the year as a whole. Now obviously we we trended backwards, some in the back half of last year, right, you know some of it. Some neighborhoods flattened out, some slipped back a little bit, but overall the number was still up. So our taxable value increased 11.7% countywide on average. So some tax taxing jurisdictions were less than that and some were a little bit more.
Speaker 1:So that's 11% for this year, correct?
Speaker 2:So we had 21 and 11.
Speaker 1:I can do some quick math that's like 50%.
Speaker 2:Well, well, well you got to think those are different things. So so one is overall movement of market value and the other one is taxable value. So taxable value already takes away that's got save our homes caps factored in, it's got exemptions factored in, so it's it's not apples and apples.
Speaker 1:That's not. I got it, that's so. I would imagine these taxing authorities and the board of county commissioners and all these people that get to spend that revenue that you increased are really happy with you, aren't?
Speaker 2:they, yes, they are, I try to encourage them to. Hey, you know, we've had 11 years of positive taxable value growth, you know, and it's probably averaged in the seven to eight percent a year range over that 11 year span and it's been pushing 12% the last two years and in some jurisdictions it's been as high as 15%. You know it wouldn't be such a bad thing to roll some milled rates.
Speaker 2:But however, you know, obviously they've got their own priorities they have to deal with and you know, I don't know all the inner workings of all those budgetary needs and obviously we've had inflation that's been record, record levels here in the last couple years, so that's been problematic. So there's. They have a lot on their plate to to ferret out and you know the cost of all the services they provide, whether it's the labor piece keeping their, their, their labor force happy, and then just all the cost of materials and construction. You know building roads and building new buildings all those things have not gotten any cheaper at all, not one bit.
Speaker 1:Would your office have any data on the influx of people? I understand you guys, that's not what you do, but do you have any idea of if there's been more people come into Pinellas County in the last three years, just versus?
Speaker 2:oh yes, they're half, and I usually, once a year, I'll kind of dig into those numbers a little bit. It's a little, it's kind of a hard thing to bear it out. I usually will get some, some driver's license information from the, from our tax collector. I'll look at, you know, normal population trend information that I can get a look at tourist data and, you know, look through that stuff to see if, you know, is Penelope's getting greater than their, their pro rat, a share of the, you know, roughly 1200 people a day.
Speaker 1:I would think so, with all of our beaches here to.
Speaker 2:Florida and the data I've looked at. It says yes, okay, you know that that are the Tampa Bay market is a very strong draw. Obviously there's more restrictions on affordable housing within Penelope's because we're effectively you know, us and Monroe County, which is the keys, were really the first two built out counties In the state of Florida, so everybody else has some sort of developable land. Ours is all redeveloped, you know so right, well, fantastic news.
Speaker 1:Do you have anything you want? Else, you want to update us on the market update of the report, for we move on to other topics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, let's, let's talk a little bit about you know, obviously supply has remained tight, particularly in Penelope's. We see it. Yeah, I mean it's not as tight in Statewide. You know it's slipping a little bit there, but you know Penelope still remains on single family under two months of supply. We know that roughly six months is a, you know, balance market. So still still definitely a seller's market at this point. But there are there is a lot more negotiation going on. You would know that better than me, but that's what I'm seeing and hearing.
Speaker 1:Finally leveling out the playing field a little bit. The poor buyers were really behind the eight ball here the last three years. It was a really frustrating situation for most buyers and they were trying in earnest to To make a good offer on a fair property and, just you know, there was 45 other other bidders on that same property.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that makes it challenging. But we have seen condos go up, they have crept up and it's over three months supply. It was down as low as the single family at one point because it was a more affordable price point, you know. So it actually at one point I think he this will apply even got under single family for a very short period. Wow, I mean it was. They were really close but it might have been just for a month. But now we're starting to see a climb and obviously we've got that new condominium legislation that passed last year that I think is starting to rear its head and have some impact there.
Speaker 1:Are you seeing that that might be bringing the values down a little bit? I understand that you know inventories up, but certainly not at a equilibrium point yet. Are you seeing, is it your feeling, that the condo laws, the new condo, the uncertainty of it all is, is bringing the values down a little bit?
Speaker 2:Yes. Well, what we're seeing is some people are because of the uncertainty. They don't know what they're, they haven't had their report done yet, they're, they're phase one, right call it. They haven't had that done yet, but they might know they're building pretty well and they might be skeptical, so they're going ahead and putting their units up for sale now before it's done.
Speaker 2:But what we think is going to happen is you're going to see a recalibration of values as we move through the next two years, because they've got a deadline of the end of twenty twenty four. They're supposed to have these done and at that point you should know what the cost is going to be to cure if you've had to go to a phase two situation to actually cure a structural defect, and that at that point you know those associations and those owners are going to have to pony up and fill that gap.
Speaker 1:To make a special assessment.
Speaker 2:Right and we're starting to see some of those have kicked in on certain properties and where those have kicked in, there is starting to be a recalibration of pricing, as you would expect, because now, all of a sudden, if you get hit with a hundred thousand dollar special assessment, it's going to affect the value of the property?
Speaker 1:Right, and you know the people. You know sad fact is, people might have come here twenty, fifteen, thirty years ago and they could afford it then. And things are going to be changing and it's going to come on the market and come online. Unfortunately, that's just the cycle of the business, nothing we can do about that, right? Well, fantastic news. So, listen, we've got some questions for you that have come in. We're going to talk about OK, you got a new site. Yes, we'll talk about at the end of the, the podcast here. We want to know all about it. I know you guys have been working on it. I think, on top of your whole pedigree, I think that you also know a little bit about technology. I have found out you're pretty. I don't want to call tech nerd, but you are, you kind of a tech nerd.
Speaker 2:I probably used to be more. Now I don't have as much time for it.
Speaker 1:You are out there quite a bit, by the way, when you say you don't have much time.
Speaker 2:Yes, I don't know but. But I was heavily involved in the in the website redesign. I mean literally it's we've I've been participated in a daily for three years, so so a lot of the, the vision, the. You know I was steering that along with some of my staff, and we worked with an outside vendor that had never built a property appraisers website and we had a design because I wanted. I wanted somebody that could give us the good user interface tools and functionality, but we wanted to control the back end and we wanted to give them the guidance on how we wanted the flow to be, the tools that we're going to, that we are going to develop and put on the site.
Speaker 1:The developer come, give it the warm, fuzzy, user friendly feel and you guys take care of all the data and technology on the backside and information that's coming out and it makes a lot of sense. Those are. Those are always challenges for companies, anytime going through an update or a change over in system, and I can imagine that you guys have been working really hard on this.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:And how many parcels again in? In Fidelis County about 450,000. So you got to have this thing right for half a million parcels out there. Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:And that's something we actually introduced to. So, of that, that parcel breakdown, it's basically 435,000 of real real estate parcels and then about another 15. Thousand of your business tangible personal property accounts. So those are now on the site to which have never been out there before. So businesses can go on and search the tangible and get their information. For the last two years.
Speaker 1:That's really neat. So that'll lead me to one of our rapid fire questions real quick. We get calls here all the time from agencies. You can imagine hey, I want to sell a mobile home. Okay, quick question down the land and the mobile, then you can handle it as a realtor. If not, I always tell them look for that TPP sticker on the on the mobile. Is that still what you guys do when you go out there to these mobile home parks that are park owned lots, and do you have to send crews out every so often to inspect those? How does that work?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, we have a manufactured home team that that goes out and looks at those, because, yeah, you've got your lot rental parks, you've got your co-op parks, you've got, you know, straight resident owned, you've got people on fee simple land. There's a lot of different manufactured home park scenarios that make those challenging, because some just have a DMV license on the on the unit and then others have a TPP sticker and then others have a real real estate.
Speaker 1:They could just have a license plate on there. Basically, yes, with the new site or the old site that I know you're going to be phasing out soon, I understand, or hope. Is there any way to go on the site and tell whether it's this these particular parks, are real property or tangible property, or is it something they just have to physically go out and find out themselves.
Speaker 2:You can kind of read the tea leaves by looking at the parcel information, but it doesn't specifically tell you that.
Speaker 1:Okay, you know what you're looking for. You go to the specific parcel and you see it's owned by some big management company or the name of the park or what not. Obviously it's part, right.
Speaker 2:Okay, right, exactly, it's under one ownership. It lights up as one big parcel on our map and you see only one owner for the whole thing. Well, that's a lot rental park.
Speaker 1:So now your units are likely licensed, got it, and that's a probably one of the most calls we get around. Okay, so my buddy or my friend is selling their mobile and you know, can I handle this transaction? Well, they own the real estate, right, and they own the mobile. You can certainly handle it. So let's let me ask you, man, we're just going to bounce around here a little bit. If that's okay with everybody, I'm going to ask you a hot button. What do you? What's going on with? How does it reflect on on on the site and on the parcel information with a paste loan.
Speaker 2:I knew I was going to get aggravated on this one, guys.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:Pinellas just won a suit with PACE and Pinellas. Pace was only authorized for commercial in Pinellas County. The county commission had to approve residential and they never have. However, there was a bond validation hearing a year ago in Leon County, which is Tallahassee area, and in that bond validation the judge made a ruling and basically had a ruling that gave PACE a comfort level to think, oh, based on that ruling, we can operate without any agreements or ordinances passed by local government in any county within the state. And they literally sent every county letter saying, oh, we're not abiding by any agreements we had in the past, we don't need them anymore. So all those agreements went by the wayside and they just started making PACE loans. So we have over 60 of them in Pinellas since the beginning of the year and they are not authorized to occur. They will not be reflected on our site or on trim notices because we literally have no connection or relationship with those vendors.
Speaker 1:So you I guess there's a relationship Obviously, you basically bill for the tax collector and the tax collector now won't, is not going to be collecting or not going to be enforced, and putting these on there.
Speaker 2:Right. The collector will not be billing those either, so those will not be on the tax bill, so as it stands right now. So Pinellas had requested an emergency hearing. That hearing went, it fell in Pinellas' favor and I believe now PACE is appealing so it's all hanging out there right now. So our status right now is we are not putting those on the trim notices and the tax collectors not putting them on the bills, so anything it doesn't mean that those people are off the hook on that obligation of that debt.
Speaker 2:However, those PACE is going to have to find a way to collect that money themselves and right now we don't look at them as being in first position because that if they're on the trim notice, that is a non-advalorum special assessment and puts them in first super priority position above any first or second mortgages and that in my mind it takes that away.
Speaker 1:So they had a sales program out there to go sell, get you and literally bump it was same as your property taxes, it was a property tax at that point.
Speaker 2:It was, and I never felt like the PACE program should have been able to tap the use of non-advalorum assessments, because it's really. It's set up to be a uniform special assessment. It's supposed to be uniformity. So they come in and you're undergrounding utilities in a neighborhood. That's a uniform assessment. All the people in the neighborhood are getting that assessment. When you come in and make a single PACE loan on one property that there's nothing uniform about that, no, no, all you're doing is jumping ahead. You're not having to meet fair lending rules and all that and you're jumping ahead of any existing debt that's already on that property.
Speaker 1:We have seen. You can imagine, in our world we see a lot of issues. Some of the residents or sellers didn't even know that this was on there and I'm sure you see it as well. Like, hey, how this could on my bill? Well, you signed the paperwork for it and it got recorded and it's on. So this is, if you were prognasticating, where do you see this going with the PACE loans? It's a sticky button. I know there's I don't know a lot of people for it. I know now there's a lot of people that aren't in favor of it. I don't really hear the proponents, other than the people with the PACE loans oh, of course that are championing this cause. Where do you see this going in the next five, 10 years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's gonna be interesting.
Speaker 2:I don't know if some of the outreach is gonna get big enough for the legislature to actually step reverse course on some of this, because obviously they allowed this to go through to begin with and I never felt it always felt a little unsavory to me because the PACE vendors would always act like they were partnered with government Correct and like it was part of a government program and it really isn't, you know, and I just don't think they should have been allowed to use the uniform method of assessment in how they do it Now in Pinellas we haven't really had to deal with the issues to this point because they weren't allowed, so we didn't have any.
Speaker 2:But I've got horror stories from my fellow property appraisers in other counties where it has been allowed and some of those counties it's been repealed. The commission went back and repealed it because it got so bad. And then others still have it but they say it's a big problem and they would really like to get rid of it. And many times the rates are at a user's interest rate if people are getting overcharged for the product itself.
Speaker 1:And if you run it out and see what they'd pay for a new air conditioner over the life of that loan, it'll shock you. Yes, I've seen $40,000 air condition in your units before.
Speaker 2:It's just insane. Yes, exactly and it certainly isn't in the best interest of the public and I would encourage anybody that is in that position that if you can do a home equity line, definitely go that route.
Speaker 1:A credit card would be better.
Speaker 2:Right, our credit card is better. Yes, because you have the ability to pay it off a lot quicker. And I think some of these pastelones, have prepayment penalties and different things in there too, depending on how they're Steep.
Speaker 1:yes, Steep, really. Yeah, it's difficult to transfer it over, even if the new owner's willing to accept it, and just a big issue that I hope we see some resolve with here coming soon. All right? So I'm gonna bounce over again and ask you another question. Tell us what is the important of All right? So let me back up one second.
Speaker 1:I know that and I happen to know this and just by accident, that a while back you might have taken some heat from your fellow property appraisers about something I think that you did that was protecting the public, and that's when I sell my house in March or April and, for whatever reason, I call the property appraisers office and I strip my homestead off of that, I think. Tell me what you did. I think you stepped out on a limb and did something a little different and allowed that new owner am I correct here? To carry out the rest of that year what the tax bill was when they purchased that property. And then, of course, they talk about their set, their tax bill with the cap being reset and all that.
Speaker 1:Well.
Speaker 2:I mean it, it's always been in place, it's in statute that you know you. Basically, if you buy a property, if you brought a property on July one from a homesteader, you get the benefit of that homestead and their exemptions through the rest of that tax year, unless that selling homesteader strips that homestead before the sale. So if they contact a property appraiser's office and say, hey, I'm out of here, remove my homestead for this tax year, then yes, it can get removed. I think what you're thinking about is. So if somebody does that before the normal March one filing deadline, they're totally in their right to do that.
Speaker 2:What we did is we stepped up and said, hey, if they pull it off after March one, we know that the seller has an ulterior motive and a lot of times what it was was they had already bought another home, maybe even in another county say, they bought it in 22. Okay, so they bought it in 2022. The new buyer had no idea that the homesteader on the property they were buying is gonna get stripped, but they strip it before March one and they file for the other house because they already owned it in 22. So they would qualify basically for January one of 2023, the property appraiser wouldn't necessarily Okay, and you're right, that is what I was thinking.
Speaker 2:Yes. So what we did is we said okay, if we run across those after March one, we're gonna deny them from pulling that away, because they marketed it as a homestead property in most cases. We've talked about putting some. We've actually talked with the board of realtors about maybe including that in disclosures. Even there is that homestead. Yes, no kind of thing.
Speaker 2:But maybe take that a little bit further and say does the seller intend to leave homestead in place for the tax year of sale, or something like this, just to put a little more teeth into it, because the yes, no, it's really not enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would imagine those are the calls that come to your the lender who's loaning the money, and they wouldn't even know that when it got stripped prior. They look at it. Here's the tax bill we can base on this year, so I could see where even title companies wouldn't even know how to do the pro-rations properly on a closing a lot of things triggered there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so they pull that off. So then you get messed up in the pro-ration. All of a sudden, the cap resets in the year that you bought instead of in the next year, so everything comes to you in a lot faster fashion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you just get hit quicker with the reality of home ownership at that point and paying your taxes. So this will lead us right into if you know you with your real estate background, your private appraisal companies. You've been out there in the real world very much as well as the political office world. What would you tell an agent? To try and best simplify in a sentence or two or three they seem to want to talk so too much sometimes To explain to their new buyer about here's what you should know about Homestead in Pinellas County, the dates important and all these things. What would you tell an agent like hey, this is your client, here's your standard go-to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and a lot of times they're dealing with it could be an out-of-state buyer or a first-time buyer or even a long-time homesteader. That just doesn't understand. Now they've built up a large amount of port for portability and they don't understand how that works. So the big thing is for them, first of all, to tell their client do not look at the seller's taxes, because that means nothing other than for the year of pro-ration. So beyond that it is a whole fresh new ball game. You're gonna go to market, the cap's gonna reset. Their best bet is to go to our tax estimator and on the website run. That takes about five seconds, yeah, enter a couple of quick pieces of information and it runs a legitimate estimate of what you're likely gonna face in the next tax year. So it's after you cross your first January, one of ownership.
Speaker 1:And that January one date is very important for your homestead because that's the snapshot you take of value. And I think the other thing is you gotta own it January one and you've gotta reside in it, correct? What is your criteria litmus test, if you will, for people actually living in the home? What are you guys gonna do?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we're looking. Hopefully they have a driver's license at that point, but a lot of times they don't if they're new to the state. But we're looking for if it's touchy, it might be a utility bill, something to place in Disha that they owned and occupied as of that point in time. And then, as far as forms of ID we're looking for is obviously your DL, your car registration in the state here locally, voter's ID, those kind of things, and it's not any one of those that you necessarily have to have. Ultimately you do have to have a DL, but we know that sometimes that gets delayed. You won't necessarily have that right on January one.
Speaker 1:So you guys kind of take a preponderance of the evidence and say, okay, it looks like you're living here, so let's talk the negative side of that. What would happen if somebody was found to be fudging on their homestead and not really residing there? What kind of actions do you guys take to prevent that from happening?
Speaker 2:Yes. So we've got queries that we run different things. We've got internal checks. We've got investigators that are looking out there and following up on claims of homestead fraud. A lot of it comes from neighbors the nosy neighbor that's how you find out everything. They often have more intel than anybody else out there or at least they think they do. They're not always right, they have their own intel anyways.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it'll be, somebody will turn in their neighbor and really the owner was out of town for two months but they had other family members come in and stay at their house for a couple months and they think they're Airbnb'ing it and all that kind of thing. So we get a lot of those too. So we have to ferret through all of that.
Speaker 1:So what would happen if somebody was committing homestead fraud? What is the penalties to that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's not a penalty that you want to have to endure, so I do not recommend anybody trying to falsify homestead. Obviously it was put in place for a reason to just apply to people that is their primary residence, so the penalty is quite stiff. So it's a 50% penalty plus 15% interest per year and we can go back 10 years on homestead fraud.
Speaker 1:So the 50% comes on the tax bill. It's 50% of what the tax bill. What's the 50%?
Speaker 2:penalty 50% of the Whatever the bill would have been the bill would have been the outstanding amount.
Speaker 1:Oh no, you don't want to. Yeah, that could be multiple.
Speaker 2:You don't want to fudge that it could potentially be multiple years. Yeah, I think people don't take that as serious as they should sometimes.
Speaker 1:That's a serious offense, so don't be messing around with your homestead, and think you know little tips too.
Speaker 2:If so, you have two homesteaders, they get married. Make sure you pull one of those off and you take which one.
Speaker 1:Well, it depends Well, it depends on which one they want to live in.
Speaker 2:Oh no, I was talking about the cap, yeah yeah, if you're reporting from one to the other, then yeah, take the biggest cap.
Speaker 1:I gotcha. And in a situation where two people are, can they let's say a couple does divorce? Unfortunately that does happen and they've lived in the same home for a long time and they have a big cap. How could one get some of it? What do they do with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, typically it's a 50-50 split is the way that statutorily it's designed to work. However, there is a form that you can fill out and submit to a property appraiser's office that you can specify the percentage that each would get, so it could be 100% and zero or anything in between, so that might even be part of at this point. As large as ports are, it really should be part of the negotiation of a divorce, of a divorce.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those attorneys need some money to settle some things too.
Speaker 2:So to argue back and forth, but a lot of times you get a situation where one spouse remains in the marital home, the other leaves. It, may not, might even leave the state or doesn't have the intent, doesn't think they're gonna buy within the portability window something like that, and they may still be on the mortgage on the other house and they're still literally paying that mortgage. So they really don't wanna lose that cap. So they might say, just leave 100% over there on the homestead.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And, like you say, and what is the caps now? What is the maximum cap for a married person or a single person?
Speaker 2:Well it's not yeah, it's not based on that like it is for federal, for IRS guidelines, the 250 and the 500 based on the gain. This is different. So this is up to 500,000 is what your port is, from one property to the next. That's a nice-.
Speaker 1:That you can carry with you, if it's over if you have more.
Speaker 2:We have homes with million dollar caps on them, or port amounts, I should say, or homestead benefits. So those would get pared down. The 500 would be the maximum.
Speaker 1:Right right, all right, let's bounce around to another topic. Well, real quick. How long? Explain to them? They sell their house. They had another house under contract maybe it was new construction and they thought it was gonna be done in December, but it didn't get done until February. How long would they have to not lose that port after they sold their home?
Speaker 2:Right, so-.
Speaker 1:They're capping that port, so Correct.
Speaker 2:So that was a piece of legislation that I carried forward and championed.
Speaker 1:We appreciate that Well, you're welcome.
Speaker 2:So and that's been a big help to a lot of people a lot of people were missing out with the former law stated two tax years. However, two tax years could be as short as basically a year and a day. So because again we're back to that January one, that's that magic date. So if you only got to two years, if you sold at the beginning of the year, if you sell at the end of the year, you've already burned your first tax year. So we had lots of people going into new construction that were totally losing their ability to port. Then we had this thing called the pandemic that actually in supply got so tight people couldn't even buy something if they wanted to, so it ended up really helping a lot of people giving that. So what we did is we added an extra tax year. So now law reads three tax years, which worst case scenario is always gonna give you at least two. But so usually you're gonna be somewhere in that two to three window, depending on what time of year you sell.
Speaker 1:So if you've had built up a big home. Say of our homestead cap. You can port it, transfer it over up to three years Is the new one. Yeah, that is a maximum. Yeah, but it could technically be two years in a day. You close on January 2nd, you don't qualify for homestead for that year.
Speaker 1:So thankfully you've gone to back. And that's the point I was making with our earlier comment about how you didn't allow these people to strip homesteads. I know some property appraisers were back in the day. I don't know what's been going on in the last couple of years since portability and that was. We really appreciate that you were looking out for the consumer and the taxpayers at that point and they shouldn't have been blindsided by that. So we appreciate that. So I wanna ask you one more thing. A popular thing out there to own properties in now is a trust because of the protections you can get in the estate planning. That's done with that. But I know if people aren't careful they don't put a trust together properly and they could actually lose their homestead. Correct, that's correct. Tell us a little bit about how you should suggest they work around that yes.
Speaker 2:So we have in house counsel in our office. He's actually was recently just promoted to the director of our exemptions department. He worked so close with them anyway on approvals of different larger exemptions, and so he is the perfect contact for this stuff. So if you ever have a question you wanna vet some trust language ahead of time, before you finalize it, just push it over to our office or call our office and ask for a gentleman named Alex Luca. He is our in house counsel and he's the only attorney in our office. So even if they call in and just say, hey, can I talk to your?
Speaker 2:in house counsel about some trust language.
Speaker 1:You'll say sure and they'll get you connected and then you can share that language and he can vet it and make sure that it's appropriate, so that Because if you were to do this, even by accident, and Alex caught it and you lost your homestead, if you've done that and filed that, there's no going back and getting that homestead and that cap back correct. Or is there some do over here you?
Speaker 2:have, we would have to pick up on it within the same tax year to again we're back to that magic January one. So those are kind of lines in the sand that once you cross those it's hard to unwind things. So one thing that we were proactive about is because we had a lot of people starting to get advice to put their homesteads in LLCs, which is a no-no because it is a legal change of ownership and it reset your cap. So you really don't wanna do that. Well, we run a query on anything that has any significant taxable value change each month. As those documents come through, specifically looking at LLC properties and things like that to see, and if it's over a certain dollar threshold of change, we'll send them a letter and say, hey, did you really mean to do this Cause it's gonna reset your cap.
Speaker 2:I had a constituent call me yesterday about one where he said hey, I got this letter. I added myself to my mom's deed and in it I got this letter. Or she got this letter that said are you sure you wanna do this this tax year? Because it's going to reset half of your cap. And the reason it was half is because it was tenants in common. And I told him. I said you should have made a joint tenants with rights of survivorship. It wouldn't have reset her cap as long as you didn't file for homestead. So he said thank you. I put him in touch with Alex, our in-house counsel, and I said let him look at it closer. But that's what it looks like to me on the surface, just when you told me it's gonna reset half. That tells me tenants in common, and that language is in our letter as well to him. So he's gonna go back and they're gonna redraft and get the deed right.
Speaker 1:Get the deed right. So that brings up another good point how many LLCs? Definitely you cannot have homestead in an LLC owned property, correct, correct? Okay, so what forms or methods would be joint tenants with right of survivorship, a trust worded correctly? What other deeds or transfer of ownership would be qualified, still for your homestead?
Speaker 2:I mean life estates. Ladybird deeds that type of stuff.
Speaker 1:Okay, so really just ladybird. Joint tenants with right of survivorship and trust are the only way you're gonna own a property that is eligible for homestead in state of Florida.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can be homesteaded as tenants in common, but you would wanna do that at the front end generally. So two people buy it, they're tenants in common, they wanna leave it to other interests, to other people. Then yes, you could both homestead simultaneous at the front end and set a cap. But you just gotta remember that if one of those interest trades, then it could reset. And what if?
Speaker 1:one of those interests. Let's just say me and my buddy buy a house and we live there and then my buddy went off and got married and his life changed. How would it pick up that the 50% of that homestead might be gone? So the other owner that is still living there could be on the hook for some potential fraud by accident here they moved out. They didn't even know. I still have it homesteaded, with both of us in here. I've got his 50, my 50, he's been gone for five years. Your department picks it up and I'm oh my gosh, I'm on the hook now for this 50% penalty on the 50% of the homestead cap I lost.
Speaker 2:Yeah, potentially.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so be careful is what. That is the other thing I would. So let's talk about when somebody does have a joint tenant with right of survivorship or a lady bird deed, enhanced life of state whatever, and there's a death, they don't, whatever the deed, it's in mine and my wife's name, I pass. And what would she do? Could she just come out to your office and bring a death certificate and you guys? How would that work?
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, that's typically what we would do. We'd look at the death certificate and if you're both, and even if the spouse wasn't on deed for some reason we have a lot of those where you'll have a marriage. However, it was a single man or woman that owned the house that became the marital home and they never they never updated the deed to reflect the spouse. That is the one case where we will add the spouse. You know that hasn't. We'll just we call it spouse not on deed, essentially, and that preserves the cap if they can prove that they were actually there and married.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I own the house. I pass. My wife never got added to the house. She could actually come out, show that, not lose the home. So she's lived there too for 20 years. That's a really good to know. I hope you guys are listening to that, because I think that scenario could play out quite a bit.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Now unfortunately that doesn't work for other family members. You know if you're not a spouse, you know if you're a child, you're on the deed. You're not homesteaded, say you know son is living with mom. Mom passes, she was the homesteader. Unfortunately, that cap is going to reset.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I get it, but it does certainly a spousal protection. I like the guys you call it there. So that's really good stuff to know, and it sounds like to me like if you're in confused about anything, just call Mike's office. Absolutely you'll get the answers.
Speaker 2:Our average on hold time is nine seconds, so you know no excuse not to call us really, and we'll get you to a warm body really fast that that can answer your questions. You've got the tax estimator out there 24 seven that you can run To get information, and then obviously the new website has loads of information that will answer. You know, the majority of people's questions if they, if they comb through it enough, just go there and click around, right, you'd be surprised the information you got.
Speaker 1:So another hot. When we get in here all the time Square footage discrepancy. I think you and I we're talking about this a little bit before the show started. I get agents call here and go. You know, hey, I'm app. Or I always tell them go their property appraisers office. I've been doing this so long I remember when you guys weren't online. I have to go to your office and get information.
Speaker 2:I was like I am dating myself. I know I used to have to climb around in courthouses and property appraisers office too around the state.
Speaker 1:micro fish, yeah look some stuff up on. The most of our listeners don't even know what that is, I'm sure. But so your office, which is the official holder of public records for name address, legal, correct and yes, yeah, and any address changes flow through us and go to the tax collector.
Speaker 2:So we're we're kind of in bed together there as far as the way our address flow works so the agent shows up and you know, says you know, mr Missseller, I've.
Speaker 1:You know, mike's office has you at 1800 square feet. My broker has said I have to list this property in the MLS at 1800 square feet and they're adamant that they have 2200 square feet or 2300 square feet and they want the agent to override that manually in the MLS, which I will tell you as a Litigious nightmare for me to do that. Don't do that, agents. What would be the remedy there? Here's what I usually tell them if you're confused, have your seller, your property owner, call Mike's office and they'll send somebody out to either straighten it up They'll figure it out and either come back, give you the bad news or go. Oh, we had it wrong. What? What is the right way to go there?
Speaker 2:Yes, that that is the right way to go. Um, well, we'll send an appraiser out and they'll come out, they'll remeasure, they'll inspect. You know things like that, so you know, oftentimes you know it's something that was enclosed, might not have been permitted, or or that permit fell through the cracks somewhere.
Speaker 1:Magically just disappeared.
Speaker 2:Yes, you know somebody enclosed a garage. We don't know about, you know things like that. But on the new website to another quick little tip and tool that is available, so if you're on the parcel detail, so if you research a property and you're on that that parcel detail page, the little toolbox that comes out on the right side, one of the buttons there, will say request property review.
Speaker 1:Oh, really, so you could do it right from the new website.
Speaker 2:Click that and it will launch an email to us, but it'll already have the parcel ID caption in there.
Speaker 1:So you just say what, what your request is, and your area appraiser will contact you to come out and take care so not to put you on the spot if you've only got a nine second hold time, I'm wondering. My next question would be how long would it usually take to get an appraiser out, like we've, because these, you know, when they go to list of properties like we want it today, it's got to be up today. You know how long does it usually take you to get somebody.
Speaker 2:I mean it's usually within a few days. It does depend on time of year and just what their workload. I mean your area appraiser could be on vacation, you know it could be right things like that usually pretty quickly.
Speaker 1:Yes, and how? So let's come, let's just I, I will tell you, I'm certain that 90 plus percent of the time it is the thing we just talked about they enclosed a porch. They didn't know or say maybe they bought it that way, it was never on there. But let's just, for giggles here, say that we did, we missed it. You're right, it should have been 2200 square foot, is 1800 square foot? Or if they want to go ahead and include the maybe unpermitted Stuff in there, how long would it take to reflect on the on the site, for you to update the records?
Speaker 2:right. Well, once, once the appraiser has been out and they make their changes I mean so in theory, literally, with usually within 24 hours, because our site flips each night, so any changes made during the day will will roll over that night and be available after midnight.
Speaker 1:So this appraiser goes out in the field, they make the determination that, yeah, we're gonna add some homestead or some square footage to this property Do. Then they just that, input it and it's reflecting the next day, or somebody, dad, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, if it's extensive, it could take more than a day, you know, if they have to literally have to redraw a bunch of you know resketch the property, things like that. Or if they need to talk To their director about hey, I got a weird one here. You know how do we want to tag this space versus that space?
Speaker 1:So but it's not that long, right, and once we have that, by the way, this is to you agents. But once we have that, once we have a, mike's office is working on it yeah, they acknowledge there's you. You want 400 or 500 or 1000 square feet added and everybody's on time, you can go ahead and list it and manually override the property at that point, or the MLS and I app on that. So, all right, let's see if we can do maybe a quick five minutes on the new website. Sure, can you tell me what's going on with that? I know that's been a A work in progress for you and a labor of love, but it's absolutely here now.
Speaker 2:Yes, it is. It is, and we got some great news from our vendor last night that they fixed some stuff with the, the mobile application that was given me fits, because it was working fine and then all of a sudden it broke, which. So I'll talk about that service in a minute. But so we will be setting sun, setting the old site. You know it served us well for, you know, absolutely over a quarter of a century. But that's the dot org.
Speaker 2:Now in the next few weeks you're or hopefully in the next week or two, you're going to see if you go to that site. You're gonna see a pop-up with a countdown Essentially saying you've got X amount of days you know you can jump to the new site now or in X amount of days you know this site will self-destruct, kind of a message. So we really want to encourage people to start migrating now, get used to a dot gov. They've been running in parallel for over a year now, so it's not like people haven't had some time to actually Get out there and drive it. You know the reviews were getting or outstanding, the people that actually go and drive it or saying, oh, I don't know, I could never go back to the old one.
Speaker 2:You know I can do so many different things. Right? You know some of the neat features in the new one that did not exist in the prior site. You can do custom reports now. So instead of just printing the detail page, you can actually hit the custom report building A button and build out what you want your report to be. So it can be the full detail page plus the latest deathe, the last deed. It can be the parcel record card, can be the FEMA letter. You know a large aerial of the of the property there's. There's about, I think about six to eight items on there that you can hide into permitting as well to, not into, permitting.
Speaker 2:So we have the permit links and they have been heavily updated and refined in the new site. You got to remember we're interacting with 24 different Municipalities and unincorporated County and they're always moving the cheese on us a little bit so their URLs change, they change their systems, they change their vendors that are hosting their permit applications, so they break things. And if you find broken links related to permits, just shoot that and we'll fix that stuff immediately. Okay, because sometimes you'll have a situation where, okay, the city was doing their own permitting, then they turned it over to the county. So now the string and the time frame of where you have to point everything Changes and you have to build out tables that address all the different scenarios. So we've been building that out for the last two years, trying to get that really tightened up, and whenever we find out something's broken, we've got our IT team jumps right on it.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, I can tell you, I've had an opportunity to play around on the new site and it. You know the old site. It was an eight-cylinder with power windows and power locks and you know it was nice. But this one's a Ferrari, it's it's, it's humming, it's nice. I really enjoy it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, you know, completely mobile friendly. It's got a neat thing right on the on the homepage, into the it's the search is front and center so you don't have to even go into any drop downs or anything. I like that and you can, and it's got a my location button right there. So if you literally if an agent pulls up in front of it in the driveway of a home, it's my location, you're gonna get a short list of the parcels you're standing closest to and likely the one your number one is the one you're on.
Speaker 2:Wow, you touch that parcel. Detail pops up.
Speaker 1:GIS department doing some work on that one?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, and then you you can turn on if, once you're on the maps, either on the Parcel detail or on the big map, you have a little the little location kind of teardrop looking icon. Yeah, you hit that and that turns on the blue dot. So now you can be driving a neighborhood and it's following it's following you and showing you where you're at.
Speaker 2:I hope you guys are listening to this and and then you can just touch on the parcel and get in the information changes to that that parcel you're in front of and I would venture to say your information is a little more accurate than Zillow, or you know.
Speaker 2:Well, they're getting it from us, but it's just delayed, you know. They know it's, ours is. And I will warn you, some of the different data vendors out there will pull different things and interpret it wrong. You know, first of all, they take our fixtures and convert that into baths at, which is not always correct, right, because we you know that how they're doing it.
Speaker 1:I was really how they pulled that interesting. Where could people find you and give us your your last two minutes here?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so so I'm always out bumping around. You know work working in the community, you know speaking different groups, so so keep an eye out whether it's you know. You know philanthropic clubs or real estate professional groups and, obviously, realtor title Even, even law. We do some CE, even for the bar associations. With our in-house council, we work that together so you can always catch me at speaking events there. And then we do public education every month and Right now we've got the next one coming up July 20. So next Thursday in our South County Service Center, which is on 2534 Street North. It's our new facility. We have a great training room upstairs there and we do that hybrid so you can come in online, you can register for that session. It will be a Noontime session Next Thursday and it's going.
Speaker 2:This one's going to be on the new website, so we're going to dig into a bunch of the, the power tools and bells and whistles, and you know we do some of the simple stuff first and then we'll jump into some some neat things that if you're Any any profession within the real estate industry, I would say tune in To that one, because you're going to learn a bunch of powerful tips That'll make your daily life a lot better do some 101 stuff, then get into a little deeper, the 201 stuff, and show them how to really make that thing home.
Speaker 1:Well, I will tell you, we really appreciate you coming in. We are appreciative of you in your office. What you guys do in the community, you've always just just been championing the, the homeowners. You really have. You've stood up to people on that and we really appreciate it. So with that guys we're going to wrap it up for this edition of golf coast to space coast. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you all next time.