A guide to protesting your property valuation increase in Corrales.
This guide is a summary of how we protested and won against our valuation increase attempts. It is important to note that the result of our protest was to keep our valuation exactly where it is and we did not reduce our valuation at all – but the assessor tried 3 times (so far) to increase our valuations by 27 percent!
The first step is to prepare.
The assessor is legally required to give you the details of your valuation. That specifically should be a list of the properties your property was compared to and the math they used to establish your value. The assessor should give this to you if you ask for it, in an excel spreadsheet or possibly just a list. It is a small amount of information, less than 1 page. But in our case she refused to give us the information when we requested, so we had to go a second step, which was to legally request the information with a public records request (IPRA). If she refuses to give you the information or only gives it to you verbally, that’s not good enough. Get the document and if you have to, sign up and use the Sandoval county IPRA website to make this request: “I am requesting the comparable properties and methods used to determine my 2025 property valuation on <whatever your property id is, the Rxxxxxx on your notice>”
https://www.sandovalcountynm.gov/public-records-request/
The second step is to determine whether you have a case based on the information she gave you.
This is core of the argument we won. The assessor compared our property which is on the very north end of Corrales Road to the nicest properties in Corrales – 5 miles south of us on along the Bosque. As you review the spreadsheet you have from the assessor you will be given a property ID for each property you were compared against. You can use the property tax website to look these up:
https://www.sandovalcountynm.gov/elected-officials/county-assessor/parcel-mapping/
You can use the search function to type in the property ID and the parcel viewer will show you that property you were compared to. Now you know the properties you were compared against. You have to answer a question. Based on these criteria, are the properties you were compared to the same or similar to yours: Size, shape, location, topography, accessibility and utilities availability. Homes that are several miles away from yours are not in the same location, are you on a dirt road and being compared to properties on a public paved street? That’s another difference. Are you on the escarpment being compared to properties along Loma Larga – again you’re not the same. Are you on the sandy side of Corrales being compared to properties in the green belt?
The third step is to file the protest form.
If you determine that any of those properties the assessor used is not like yours, you’ve got a case like ours. You can go to protest and state that the assessor compared you to non-comparable properties based on those differences you highlighted above, and you would say you want your valuation to remain the same based on the fact that there were no comparable properties close enough to justify a change in your valuation.
https://www.sandovalcountynm.gov/elected-officials/county-assessor/forms/
Find the “protest petition” form at the bottom of this page, fill it out using your current year’s valuation. As an example for 2024 everyone west of loma larga had their valuation go from 125k/acre to 166k/acre. You would use 166k as the total assessor’s value, 125k as total property owner’s value and 41k as the protested amount. Your explanation is that the comparables provided by the assessor are not comparable as determined by the district court D-1329-CV-2023-01382. That citation is the court case my wife and I won that says the assessor fails to consider actual property characteristics in selecting their comparable properties, which is unlawful.