Every year across Ohio some counties  undergo a review in property value to increase the tax to be collected based on the new value. There are two types of review, reappraisal and update. This process is called both a triennial update and a sexennial reappraisal. Triennial because every three years your property taxes are reviewed and updated, often increased. Sexennial reappraisal because every six years every county is required to appraise property values and improvements based on market values.

The REAPRAISAL process appraises every property. The UPDATE process is a simplified review which updates the value. If these descriptions sound vague, it is. They are unique to every county and under the direction and control of the county Auditor.

If you want to purchase a home and intend to get a mortgage, the bank will do a full market appraisal which will cost you between $500 and $1500 based on the location and appraiser. With thousands of properties in every county doing this type of detailed appraisal is impossible. Therefore, county auditors develop unique ways to accomplish this huge, and costly, undertaking every three years.

According to the above image you can see the evaluation schedule appears random and disorganized. In an effort to determine some type of reasoning behind the above map I assumed it was based on a balanced number of people, or at least voters. What I found was very curious.

In 2024 a moderate 33 percent of voters are impacted, in 2025 a paltry 12 percent, and in 2026 a whopping 55 percent. The evaluations set the property tax values for the subsequent years, a 2024 evaluation will start being collected in 2025 and so on.

This challenged me to consider the people responsible for this process, the legislature, the county auditor and county treasurer. The county officials cannot set when their county is reviewed, this decision happens in Columbus. Legislators prefer to be reelected. Therefore, if you must do something that causes distress to voters you may want to control how many are aggravated at the same time. Before you blame the current legislators remember this process has been in place for well over a hundred years.

Here is a good 6 page brief on the property tax process

For information about your county. Click your county below and see CUPP data over the years and a link to your county auditor website.