Several articles on the topic of assessing golf courses have come to my attention in the past few days. I've posted previously on the topic, but will start fresh here.
The first article had to do with assessments in Greenwich, Connecticut, where eight private golf clubs were seeking assessments of just $60,000 per acre. Now that might seem like a high value to people who live in the heartland of America, but Greenwich is a place where a single-acre building lot (with or without an existing house on it) can sell for well over $1 million, and where roughly 1 in 4 residential transactions results in a teardown, often of a home which would be considered a super-luxury home nearly anywhere else. The assessor had sought to value the land at a still-very-generous-to-the-clubbers $200,000 per acre. (By law -- a peculiar law whose justification I don't follow, CT's assessments are to be 70% of actual value, so the $200,000 valuation would be about $285,000 -- still a very generous valuation in a town with high property values.)
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