Park County homes keep adding value

Posted 4/27/17

“Even … when everything was falling apart and everything, Park County held up pretty well,” said Assessor Pat Meyer. “So we did pretty good — and we’re still doing fairly well.”

Across the county, the median sales price for a …

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Park County homes keep adding value

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As oil and gas production has ebbed and flowed in Park County and Wyoming, the local housing market has stayed steady.

“Even … when everything was falling apart and everything, Park County held up pretty well,” said Assessor Pat Meyer. “So we did pretty good — and we’re still doing fairly well.”

Across the county, the median sales price for a single-family home — with less than 10 acres of property — rose to $231,250 last year, according to data crunched by the assessor’s office. That’s up by a couple thousand dollars, or 1.2 percent, from 2015.

“County-wide, we’re kind of on the rise,” Meyer said.

The number of sales remained about the same: 311 homes changed hands in Park County in 2016, just a few more sales than the prior year.

The number of sales stayed steady in both Powell and Cody — with 90 and 128 sales, respectively — but home values went in slightly different directions in the two cities.

Powell home values stayed “pretty flat” in 2016, Meyer said, with the median home price falling to $170,033. That was a drop of nearly $4,000, or roughly 2.3 percent, from 2015.

In Cody, meanwhile, the median home price rose by $3,000 (1.3 percent) to $236,000.

“It’s hard to get anything under the $200,000 now,” Meyer said.

The assessor’s data indicates that the middle-of-the-pack house in Cody is now worth nearly 39 percent — or almost $66,000 — more than the median home in Powell.

Data from verified sales helps the assessor’s office calculate a property’s market value, which sets the property’s taxable value. That assessed valuation is then taxed by various local governments. K-12 schools are the biggest beneficiaries of property taxes; the taxes are also a major source of revenue for the Park County government.

Meyer’s office recently sent out updated assessments for nearly 20,000 pieces of land and other taxable property owned throughout the county. Most Park County homeowners will see single-digit increases to their fair market value, Meyer said.

“The South Fork, ... a lot of action was going on there; they tended to go up a little bit more,” Meyer said.

He said commercial properties in Powell also went up, “because they were pretty low and we had some sales over there” showing the estimated market values were low.

Typically, as property values rise and fall, so do the amount of taxes that a property owner must pay; as a general rule, higher fair market values translate into higher taxes.

Most of the property taxes paid across the county come from oil and gas production. That’s largely because those minerals are taxed on 100 percent of their value while commercial, agricultural and residential properties are only taxed on 9.5 percent of their value.

Because of the downturn in the minerals industry, Park County’s assessed valuation — the property tax base — shrunk by more than 26 percent between 2014 and 2015. That meant roughly $16.5 million less for local governments last year. Meyer is guessing that, as the final numbers come in over the next several weeks, the data will show that the overall property tax base shrunk by another 5 percent in 2016. That will again mean fewer tax dollars for schools, the county government, cities, fire districts and other government entities. However, Meyer says the minerals industry has already started rebounding.

“Those first two quarters [of oil and gas production] were way down, but the last two were way up — more,” Meyer said, later adding that, “It’s all going to be coming back.”

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