Grim picture of property values

Counties and cities across Florida now have a better idea of how much money they’ll have to work with next year. Today was the day for property appraisers to finalize their numbers. In Pinellas County, the declines are in the double digits. The new measure of Pinellas County’s real estate market is the total value of all those buildings and land to the tax man. And the numbers are not pretty: taxable value for the whole county is down 11 percent. Oldsmar took the lightest hit, with a 5.6 percent drop. The biggest decline was in Indian Shores, down a whopping 17 percent. And it is almost as bad in most other beach towns. They were also the areas that increased the most, ‘03 to ‘06 and a little bit into ‘07. So what went up is now coming down, not only there but in the county as a whole. Foreclosures, vacancies, and condos pushed values down. “The value of condo properties went down, eh, between 10 and 30 percent,” said Pam Duboy, Pinellas County property appraiser. For

the mayor of Indian Shores, this is deja vu. “We’re coming off last year, which was 15 percent too, so that’s 32 percent in two years. That’s a lot of lost property value in our town,” said The mayor says there really haven’t been that many foreclosures in Indian Shores, but there are a lot of unsold condominiums. Fortunately for the little town, taxable values went up more than 150% from 2001 to 2006, and the extra tax dollars went into reserves. “We were able to put money away in that period for this period.” Still, with only about ten employees plus a tiny police department, cutting the budget again will be a challenge. It’s even more of a challenge in bigger cities like St. Petersburg and Clearwater, where dozens of people will probably be laid off. Property appraisers used to ignore foreclosures, because they were so uncommon. But with more than 1,000 foreclosures per month in Pinellas, they are now part of the market.  

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Grim picture of property values

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