David Moore lives in rural Bellvue, Colorado, five miles up a dirt road that follows every twist and turn of Buckhorn Creek. From the deck off his kitchen, you can spot more hummingbirds than human neighbors. Cell phone service is sketchy, at best, and the closest power line is miles away.
“I’m not connected to any utilities,” Moore said, as if there were any utilities to connect to in this area. “I think that's one reason why I and the neighbors like it up here is because it is remote. I think most would not really want the power lines to be brought in.”
Moore bought his small piece of the mountain 21 years ago. At the time, the only structure on the property was a decommissioned historic red caboose that sat just a few feet back from the road. A previous owner had hauled it up the mountain sometime in the 1970’s.
“One of my friends called me and said they just put a sign on the red caboose down there,” Moore recalled. He jumped at the opportunity and paid $48,500 to make it his own.
For years, Moore lived in the caboose, which didn’t have plumbing, electricity or heat. “It was hard to keep the place warm in the winter, but it was kind of nice to be in the canyon,” he said. But he had bigger dreams for the site. “When I looked at the property, I was like, yeah, I want to build up on top because the views are nice and it's a little further off the road,” he said.
Over time, he saved up to build a house and leaned on some friends to help with the construction. He installed solar panels and eventually drilled a water well. With all those improvements, his property value - along with his property tax bill – increased. “Obviously when I built the house, I expected it to go up,” Moore said. “I felt it was somewhat reasonable.”
Every two years, county assessors in Colorado estimate the value of all the local real estate. Those official valuations become part of the formula that determines property taxes.
The last valuation cycle was 2021, and at that time, the county pinned the value of Moore’s property at just shy of $220,000, which seemed about right. But he was bewildered when the new notice came from the county assessor’s office last spring. This time around, for the 2023 cycle, that valuation had jumped to $651,000.
It had been quite a few years since Moore had made any major improvements to his property. But the county was saying his property value had nearly tripled in just two years.
Since 2020, a hot housing market fueled by low interest rates, pandemic lifestyle shifts and work from home policies, launched residential property values across Colorado into the stratosphere. Those leaps in property value prompted record numbers of homeowners to appeal their counties' assessment.
But while homeowners across Larimer County, where Moore lives, were up in arms about an unprecedented 40 percent rise in property values since 2021, Moore and his neighbors on Buckhorn were seeing much, much bigger increases – on the order of 200 percent, sometimes even more – on their valuation notices.
They began to suspect that their rural, mountain properties were being evaluated unfairly.
Mass Appraisals
County assessors, like all appraisers, use recent sale prices of other, similar properties – so-called comparables – to dial in on real estate value. Larimer County Assessor Bob Overbeck’s office is in charge of doing this for all 162,000 residential parcels in his jurisdiction, every two years. To tackle that daunting task, they conduct mass appraisals using a computer model that identifies comparable properties.
“We don't have the resources or time to hire individual appraisers to walk down the street and say, this is what the value of your home is,” Overbeck said. “We have to collect all this data in this two-year period…to figure out what the value of your property is."
The computer model also incorporates data about the market impact of unique qualities a parcel might have – proximity to a lake, for instance – and uses that to adjust the outcome. “We put all that information in, and we got to hit a button, and we spit out a value,” Overbeck said.
What sets rural, mountain areas apart
According to Northern Colorado Realtor Louise Creager, the problem is that in rural, mountain areas, comparable properties are hard to come by.
“We're not in a neighborhood as in town, where you have maybe ten different style homes in that one neighborhood,” Creager said. “Ours are all different. We have everything from cabins that were built in the sixties to homes that were rebuilt in 2012. It's just very, very different from one road to another.”
Creager has helped several clients, including Moore, appeal their valuations. Through that work, she noticed a pattern. “In town, [the valuations] were pretty much almost always correct,” Creager said. But among the rural, mountain properties she examined there were a lot of problems. “Some of them were way off track, because their comparables were not anywhere near the same type of property,” she said.
In her opinion, the county overvalued Moore’s property by some $200,000.
Overbeck said his office just follows the real estate data. “We have no incentive to overvalue or undervalue,” he said. “Nobody gets a bonus. We get the same amount of applause and grief no matter what we do.”
According to Overbeck, the mass appraisal model is sophisticated, but he admits that it could be off in areas that don’t have a lot of sales data, which is often the case in rural, sparsely populated regions.
“It's all about the data. The cleaner your data, the better the data, the better the outcome,” he said.
The outcome speaks for itself. According to Overbeck’s office, they ended up granting about one third of the appeals sent in from metro parts of the county, like Fort Collins and Loveland, meaning they agree they got those valuations wrong the first time around. When it comes to rural parts of the county, well over half the appeals resulted in an adjustment. And in Bellvue, David Moore’s neck of the woods, the assessor’s office adjusted nearly two thirds of the appealed valuations.
That includes David Moore’s own appeal. In the end, the county reduced his valuation by more than $100,000, bringing it down to $544,600, which is less of a reduction than he’d asked for. He appealed a second time, to the County Board of Equalizers, but they denied a further adjustment.
Moore decided not to escalate his case to the state level. The county already rejected his best argument, and he just doesn’t have the time to pursue the issue further. But he’s still convinced his property valuation is inflated. “I don't mind paying taxes,” he said. “I just want to see fairness across the board.”
