The Upside of the Real Estate Crash

I was on Zillow today, poking around looking at a home that was recently listed a couple of blocks away.

Of course, I had to look up our home as well.  As for the Zillow Zestimate, it has our home listed as worth $40,000 less than what we paid for it, almost 10 years ago now, which I would say is not too far off the mark.

More interesting to me, Zillow has property tax records listed going back to the year we bought the home.  And while I knew hour taxes had gone way down, whoo-hoo I was surprised by the actual numbers.  Our property taxes are down 54% from 2004.  And, since Florida has both a homestead law and a law called Save our Homes, our property taxes on our primary dwelling (does not apply to our investment properties) can only increase at the rate of inflation or 3% which ever is less.  As a result, it is going to take a very long time, assuming values continue to rise, to get back to that initial tax bill from 2004.