11/12/2024 Assessment Community Weekly
Reminder: RPS Online Valuation Survey responses due November 15
If you have not already completed the Valuation Survey, please do so by November 15. The information from this survey will help to improve the comparable sales, cost, and manual model valuation modules in RPS Online.
Please share this survey with your staff, contractors, appraisers, and other parties (including those outside of the assessment community) who use RPS Online for valuation purposes.
The RPS Online Constituents Group will review the results of the survey and make recommendations to ORPTS and the RPS Online Project Team.
If you have questions or input about RPS Online, please send them to RPSOnline@tax.ny.gov. We will use your questions to build a frequently asked questions webpage for the assessment community, and your feedback is valuable as we continue to design and develop the system.
Legislative update: Transfer on death deeds (TODDs) now permitted
New section 424 of the Real Property Law (not Real Property Tax Law), which was enacted as a part of the 2024-25 State Budget legislation (L.2024, Ch.56, Pt. O, sec. 12), generally permits the use of TODDs in New York State. If a TODD has been duly executed (and is not revoked), then—upon the owner’s death—the property will be transferred to the beneficiaries named in the deed without the need for probate.
TODDs may be recorded in the same manner as other types of deeds. However, they do not need to be accompanied by Form RP-5217 or TP-584.
RPSV4 users: To indicate that a TODD is executed for a specific property, you may wish to add a note in the Ownership field on the Owner screen. Content in that field is informational only; it does not impact other fields or processes. Nor does it appear on letters or public documentation. However, the Ownership field is available for use in custom reports.
For RPS Online, we’re monitoring developments regarding the recent authorization for TODDs, and we will incorporate functionality into RPS Online as appropriate.
Report #10: NYS Tax Return Deceased Report
The NYS Tax Return Deceased Report (Report #10) is now available in the Online Assessment Community to assessors and county directors. In prior years, only county directors could access the report. However, a law change enacted in 2022 granted access to the report for assessors as well.
The report lists property owners who:
- are receiving or registered for a STAR benefit, and
- were reported as deceased on a recent New York State income tax return.
This report is for your information; you are not required to take action based on the report. If you choose to use the information in this report, before making any changes to your files, you may wish to cross reference it against local information on the Internet or other sources.
If you come across a property owner that is erroneously listed in the report (that is, they’re not deceased), it is almost certainly due to information mistakenly reported on an income tax return. You can notify us at assessor.report.feedback@tax.ny.gov, and we will update the report when it is next published.
2024 STAR credits and STAR exemption savings
Each year, we publish STAR credit and exemption savings amounts for each of the 3,000-plus school district segments statewide. This enables interested homeowners and local officials to compare the differences in their school district segments.
As you’ll recall, due to a law change in 2019, the STAR exemption savings can no longer increase, but the STAR credit can increase by as much as 2% annually. As a result, the STAR credit is more than the STAR exemption savings in many cases.
After we issue STAR credits, we update the STAR credit and exemption savings amounts to make it easy to compare the two benefits.
We will update the numbers for Nassau and Suffolk Counties later in the year after they issue their school tax bills.
Wondering why we don’t publish this data earlier in the year when homeowners would have a chance to switch to the STAR credit? We rely on school tax rates to calculate STAR credits and STAR exemption savings. The final rates are not available until just before school tax bills are issued.