Reviewing Comparable Sales
One way to determine if your property assessment is accurate is to review properties that have sold that are as similar as possible to your property. The sales information linked to this page may help in finding such properties. Sales in the files below occurred from July 1, 2021 through July of 2024. Sales from July 1, 2021 to April 1, 2024 were used to update the City's valuation tables and develop updated property valuations for the 2024 tax year.
If you are seeking comparable sales to your property, here are some of the characteristics you can review in order to compare a sale property to your property. You'll be very lucky (or you live in one of Bath's few neighborhoods with similar properties, such as the Oliver St to High St. brick properties) if you find sales that match your property in all these measurements, so be flexible in your review. Make a list of prospective comparable property sales, and then find the sales that are the closest matches. It can also help to look for sales that are a little bit better (larger, newer, nicer) than your property along with sales that are a little less desirable than your property (smaller, not as great a location, not in as good a condition). Appraisers often use this approach to "bracket" their subject property, especially if they can't find sales that are a close match.
What makes a sale property comparable to my property?
Primary characteristics include:
- Property Type (Property Use): Whether a property is a single family property, a duplex or a condominium.
- Neighborhood: The "market area" where your property is located (the assessing neighborhood), or an even smaller area, such as your street or immediate neighborhood.
Once you've found some sold properties that are similar to your property in at least one of these characteristics, it's time to drill deeper. The lists of sales from 2021 to 2024 on this page include information on a number of items that most affect a property's valuation. They include:
- Living area: Ideally, look for sales of properties that are less than 1,000 sq ft. larger or smaller than your property.
- Building Style: Whether a comparable property has a similar layout and look to your property. Examples of building styles include ranch, cape code, contemporary, colonial and bungalow. Most Bath properties are "conventional" style, a general catch-all style. It's fine to include matches that are similar in style to your property even if there is not an exact match. There are some property styles that are quite rare in Bath (such as split-levels).
- Grade: Grade reflects "the quality of construction" of a property. It reflects architectural elements, windows and the shape of a building. Look for sales within 1-3 grade levels of your property. Grades range from X+ (Excellent+) down to E- (Poor-). Most sales (and most properties) are graded in the B and C range (from B+ to C-).
- Condition: Condition reflect the amount of repairs and effort needed to make a property "like new." Condition ranges from R (rebuilt) to VP (very poor). Look for sales within 1 condition level of your property. Most property is in average or good condition.
- Kitchen or Bath Style: These factors reflect the outsized impact kitchens and baths have in the housing market. Most properties are described as having an average or modern kitchen and bathrooms. For bathrooms, both average and modern descriptions are valued the same.
- Year built: Look for sales of homes that are of an age similar to yours. This can be pretty broadly defined, since so many Bath homes are older than 1940, but it's useful to start by looking for buildings that are built within 50-100 years of your property if you have an old house, and within 30 years of your property if you have a newer house (post 1940). One idiosyncrasy you should know is that if a property has a year built of 1900, that probably reflects the assessing system's convention that 1900 means "we don't know, but it's old." If your property is shown in our records as being built in 1900, you'll need to review other characteristics and the property images to find properties that are the closest match to yours.
I have some comparable property sales. How do I know if there's a problem with my value?
Once you have a list of possible comparable properties based on these characteristics, review the properties in the online assessor's database (especially the pictures) and consider how the valuation of your property compares to the sale prices and the valuations of similar properties. On average, the 2024 property valuations reflect approximately 94.5% of the sale prices between July 1, 2021 and June 30, 2022, 84.8% of sale prices from July 1, 2022 to June 30, 2023, and 75.1% of sale prices from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024. But this doesn't mean your property's value will be exactly the same as the comparable properties you have found. The ratio of assessed values to sale prices in this database goes from 45% to 165%, which could reflect changes in a property's characteristics since the sale, special circumstances in the sale, an error in our descriptions of a property, or just the vagaries of human nature when buying and selling properties. Keep in mind the following:
- Assessing involves describing all of the property in Bath based on the characteristics of the 400 or so sales in this database, and predicting, based on those sales, what each property that is not on the market would sell for. Assessing is not exact, but your property's valuation should be a reasonable approximation of market value. "Reasonable approximation" of market value means our property values should generally be within 10% or so either way of the assessment ratio for the year of the sale you are comparing to your property, according to statute and Maine court cases (see below for an example of how this math works).
The following files are PDF reports of residential sales between 2021 and 2024.
- 2021-2024 Residential Sales by Date.pdf
- 2021-2024 Residential Sales by Neighborhood.pdf
- 2021-2024 Residential Sales by Street.pdf
- 2021-2024 Residential Sales by Building Style.pdf