Cabin Property Tax Checkup
Are you paying too much property tax on your cabin?
Yakima County assessors inspected our cabins last year, something they are required by law to do every six years. With their data now available on the county’s web site, each cabin owner is advised to check to see if the information is correct. One of our members found three errors regarding his cabin and this is important because the information is used by other agencies which could impact the amount of money you pay in taxes and other fees.
The easiest way to check the information is to go to www.yakimap.com which is the county’s Land Information Portal sponsored by the Yakima County Assessor and the Yakima County Geographic Information Services (GIS). This site has some general information and is a great place if you are a map person. Once you get to the site go to Parcel Mapping and enter your parcel number. You can add contours, utilities, and critical areas on top of your cabin area. You can also expand the area to anywhere in Yakima County, and you can look at aerial photographs of your cabin area or any part of the county. You can click on the Real Estate tab and find recent sales in your area or expand the area and look at the highway 410 area. These will be red dots on the map. Click on a red dot for information about that sale.
Go back to the Land Information Portal and click on the Yakima
County Assessor in the center at the top of the screen or go to
yes.co.yakima.wa.us/assessor/. Click on Parcel Search and
enter your cabins parcel number. The search should bring up your
cabin information including pictures they took last year. This is
where you want to make sure the information is correct. In one
case they showed the size of the upper floor of a cabin to be larger
than it really is. Consequently, the cabin owner has been paying
higher taxes than necessary. In addition, the lot size was recorded
to be almost three times the actual size. This error does not affect
your taxes, because the county only taxes the improvements, not the
land. However, it is an error that should be corrected. You can
click on some of the other tabs to find out information on your out
building, taxes, and a history of your cabin’s value.