The Wahkiakum County Eagle - Established as The Skamokawa Eagle in 1891

To The Eagle:

Recently Puget Island Landowners were mailed a letter and a valuation order for their parcel from the county Board of Equalization (BOE).

I asked tor additional information to better understand what I had received. Colleen Haley, Clerk of the Board responded via e-mail with the property sales information I requested and an electronic copy of briefing materials the BOE had used to explain what they had done during the equalization process. The information is more useful and easier to understand than any information I have obtained from the Assessor's office since my first visit to the county in 2001. The presentation material documented what was done. The "why" it was done that way may have been stated verbally. I missed the "why" by not being at a presentation.

The BOE property classification system developed for the Puget Island properties is, in my opinion, better and more user friendly than the "Definitions of Sales Types" list that has been part of the Property Sales Report from the Assessor's office for years. I hope the Assessor will build onto the BOE classification system for all properties in the county.

My parcel now has a classification code of 3AB in the BOE system. The "3" indicates that the parcel is slough bank property on Welcome or Birnie slough. The "A" indicates that the water is deep enough for a boat, and the "B" means it is a buildable parcel. This system groups like parcels by their code making it easy to find comparable sales information for properties like mine sold in the last five years. The sales information provided by Colleen is an electronic spreadsheet file which I did use in my analysis. Wow! Wish I could have had information from the Assessor's office over these 10 years in electronic format.

Fifteen parcels of slough front properties were sold during the last five years. Only four have the classification code of 3AB. How easy was that? In the past I would have had to drive by the sold properties to mark up that list in an attempt to identify comparable parcels. I now have the information for the four property sales that were used by the BOE in setting their "true & fair market value" for my parcel.

I got a ballpark value for my parcel by calculating the average sale price per slough front foot (FF) for the four properties and then multiplied that gross cost factor by the 110 FF of my parcel. Based upon these sales my parcel will not sell for what I paid for it in 2002. I do not like the reality of that finding.

Hindsight shows that the housing bubble began in 1998 when the housing price index was 110. By 2006 that index was at 200. I clearly bought during the up-slope of the housing boom.

Don Koenig

Puget Island