"If you wish to test the merits in point of certainty of land value taxation as compared with other taxes, go to a real estate agent in your community and, showing him a building lot upon the map, ask him its value. If he inquires about the improvements, instruct him to ignore them. He will be able at once to tell you what the lot is worth. And if you go to twenty other agents their estimates will not materially vary from his. Yet none of the agents will have left his office. Each will have inferred the value from the size and location of the lot.
But suppose when you show the map to the first agent you ask him the value of the land and its improvements. He will tell you that he cannot give an estimate until he examines the improvements. And if it is the highly improved property of a rich man he will engage building experts to assist him. Should you ask him to include the value of the contents of the buildings he would need a corps of selected experts, including artists and liverymen, dealers in furniture and bric-a-brac, librarians and jewelers.
Should you propose that he also include the value of the occupant's income, the agent would throw up his hands in despair. If without the aid of an army of experts the agent should make an estimate of these miscellaneous values, and twenty others should do the same, their several estimates would be as wide apart as ignorant guesses usually are. And the richer the owner of the property the lower as a proportion would the guesses probably be.
Now turn the real estate agent into an assessor, and is it not plain that he could appraise land values with much greater certainty and cheapness than he could appraise the values of all kinds of property? With a plot map before him he might fairly make almost all the appraisements without leaving his desk at the town hall.
And there would be no material difference if the property in question were a farm instead of a building lot. A competent farmer or business man in a farming community can, without leaving his own dooryard, appraise the value of the land of any farm there; whereas it would be impossible for him to value the improvements, stock, produce, etc., without at least inspecting them."
-- "The Taxation of Land Values," (pp. 107, 108) Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis.
Comments