Anchorage Daily News

The real estate of Anchorage is valued at $28.3 billion.

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That's the estimate last week from city assessor Marty McGee. His office makes the annual calculation so that property tax rates can be set.

McGee said the assessed value of the housing portion of Anchorage's real estate is $19.5 billion, up 2 percent from a year earlier -- a sign that the red-hot housing market of recent years cooled in 2007.

Last week, McGee talked about how the local housing market is different from the meltdown happening in parts of the Lower 48.

"A lot of the stories we have, and press that's been out, is about what's going on nationally in real estate," McGee said. "And real estate markets are not national markets, they're local markets, so what's happening in Anchorage is different than what's happening in Fairbanks or Wasilla, and it's certainly different than what's happening in Los Angeles or Phoenix.

"Now, Los Angeles and Phoenix are the horror stories we're hearing, about the high rates of foreclosure and heavily impacted by this subprime lending. It's just not happening in Alaska.

"The fundamentals of our economy are still strong. The employment is up, the amount of income is up. Occupancy of homes -- we don't have a lot of homes vacant and for sale. In fact, we have very few, and it's also even more true for commercial property. Very low rates of vacancy, rental rates are increasing. So, it's a healthy economy and a healthy real estate market; it's just not increasing at the same rate as it did in past years."

McGee said four-plexes are the only market segment he saw falling in value.

"People buying and selling four-plexes are reacting differently than the people buying and selling houses. Probably there's a little higher rate of foreclosure in four-plexes, so that's probably affecting it some."

Below are other excerpts from his interview.

Q. Last year, you said the residential market slowed down.

A. Right. And the real evidence came through from July until the end of the year.

Q. So the residential assessments aren't going up as much this year. Are you optimistic maybe that there will be fewer appeals of property assessments this year?

A. I can't really tell. You know, we'll see. There are all kinds of different factors. There's this perception, because of the stories that people have been reading that the market is collapsing and it's a terrible thing and so how could we possibly increase value or even not decrease it.

I think the facts don't support that; that's why we've set the valuation where we have. But I don't know what the reaction of the public's going to be to that.

Realtors gave a presentation (Jan. 9), an overview of what has happened in the real estate market this year and what they anticipate for next year. They came to the same conclusion I'm coming to.

The sky is not falling. Real estate values are still increasing. The volume of sales is relatively healthy. They characterized it as a normal real estate market instead of ... sort of a hyper-inflated real estate market.

Q. What would you say to someone whose tax bill is going to go up more than the $100 average?

A. We'll talk about the specifics of their home. Where their home is located. How it's built ... its desirability on the market. What we've observed. And they can see this on the Web site too. They can see what the actual sale prices of other homes like theirs are. Now of course my job is to estimate the value, not predict the tax.

If you happen to be in a tax district with a limited road service area, where your community chose to spend more money on their roads, they chose to increase their taxes. If you happen to be in a particular area of the community that supported new bonds to build new facilities for your segment of the community, then that increased taxes. Taxes are related to services.

Q. The new assessments were just mailed to property owners. Talk about getting an assessment changed because it's wrong.

A. Beginning today, when we start talking to people, some of these are going to get adjusted, and they'll be moved out. So people do have to pay attention to this date on the card. Because new cards will be issued. And there will be in the order of, say, 2,000 adjustments that will occur in the next two weeks, based on people coming in, providing us information and we're changing their assessment.

That isn't an appeal. That doesn't cost them any money and they don't have to file a formal appeal to get that. That's a correction.

Find Kyle Hopkins online at adn.com/contact/khopkins or call 257-4334.

Will you pay more? See this list

Your assessed property value may have gone up or down depending on where you live and what kind home you have. Here's how values in some areas changed in 2007, according to the city assessor's office:

Downtown: Up 3 percent

Mountain View: Up 1 percent

Hillside: Up 2 percent

Central Bowl: No change

Foothills: Up 1 percent

Sand Lake: No change

Custom homes: Up 4 percent

Duplex/triplex: No change

Four-plex: Down 2.4 percent

Townhouse: Up 2 percent

Mid-range townhouse condo: Up 3 percent

Mid-range multi-res condo: Up 7 percent

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