Posted: Mon Sep 29, 2008 8:41 am-
I was generalising when I said that, it appears to me that property taxes in southern Nevada are close to 3% on average, in Arizona they seem to be around 2% and in southern California (notably San Diego) they are just over 1%.
Obviously it depends on the specific municipality though, in Boulder City which is near the Hoover Dam the property tax rate is just under 2.5%.
The catch is that the reason for the difference is because of the State income tax. If you ever actually moved permanently to Arizona or California you would actually pay more tax than in Nevada because the income tax rate is higher.
If it's just a vacation home though obviously you'll never pay State income tax.
Florida is another State where you have to be careful. They just raised the homestead exemption to $50,000, so if you live there permanently (and by "permanently" they've clamped down on that and it means an LPR or a US citizen), then a house valued at $100,000 is only taxed on $50,000 of the value.
However if it's a vacation home you get taxed on $100,000, plus there is a 3% cap on increases in property tax for people who have a homestead exemption, but not for people who have vacation homes.
I have to say I think there are areas that aren't going to recover from this housing slump and buying there would be a serious error. Some of the bedroom communities near Phoenix and San Francisco I think are basically just going to be ghost towns. I've looked at some of the new developments that were thrown up around San Diego and Las Vegas and the quality of construction is total crap, they were built by overzealous developers selling to overzealous investors. I went round one development in Henderson and they'd actually covered up a hole in the floor with carpet.
What happened was they were halfway through the development, buyers dried up, so they basically finished them as cheaply as possible.
I'd stick with stuff that was built at least four or five years ago that isn't surrounded by foreclosures.
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Steve.