The Office of Property Appraiser is part of your local county government, serving all of Putnam County, both the unincorporated areas and the cities of Crescent City, Interlachen, Palatka, Pomona Park and Welaka.

The primary responsibility of this office is to set a value for every piece of property in Putnam County, no matter how big or how small, on the appraisal date, which is January 1 of each year.

There are approximately 97,000 individual parcels of land throughout Putnam County and about 29,000 of these have buildings or mobile homes located on them. Approximately 3,500 Tangible Personal Property accounts are also handled each year by the Property Appraiser's staff.

Part of the job of setting values is to keep track of the 8,000 ownership transactions that occur each year and maintaining records and property maps. The Office's field staff visits each piece of property at least once every three years.

In addition to appraising property, the Property Appraiser must administer 19,000 homestead exemptions, determine the eligibility of certain religious, charitable, educational, and institutional property for tax exemption, as well as administer widow and disability exemptions.

Florida Law requires the Property Appraiser to appraise all property at its "just" or "fair market value."

Finding the value of your property is simply a matter of discovering the price most people would pay for it in the shape it's in today. In other words, it's often defined as the highest sale price that a willing buyer will pay and a willing seller will sell for.

To find the value of any piece of property, the Property Appraiser must first know what properties similar to it are selling for, what it would cost today to replace it, how much it takes to operate and keep it in repair, what rent it may earn, and many other dollar facts affecting its value, such as the current rate of interest charged for borrowing the money to buy or build property like yours.

Utilizing these facts he can then go about finding the property's value in three different ways.

The first way is to find properties like yours, which have been sold recently. Their selling prices, however, must be analyzed very carefully to get at the true picture. One property may have sold for more than it was really worth because the buyer was in a hurry to occupy the property and would pay any price to get in.

Another may have sold for less money than it was actually worth because the owner needed cash right away. He was willing to sell to the first buyer who made him an offer.

Using this approach--comparing the selling prices of properties similar to yours--the Property Appraiser must always consider such over or underpricing to arrive at a fair evaluation of your property's value.

The second way the Property Appraiser can go about this is based on how much money it would take, at current material and labor costs, to replace your property with one just like it. If your property is not new, he must also determine how much it has depreciated.

A third is used in addition to the other two if you happen to own property that provides you with a rental income, like an apartment house, a store, or a factory. Here the Property Appraiser must consider such dollar facts as your operating expenses, taxes, insurance, maintenance costs, the degree of financial risk you take in earning income from your property, and finally, the return most people would expect to get on this kind of property.

When market value changes, naturally so does appraised value. For instance, if you were to increase the total market value of your property by building a swimming pool in your backyard, the appraised value would increase proportionately.

Similarly, should your property's value be decreased by a fire, the appraised value would decrease to show the downward effect of this damage on the market value of your property.

In fact, the economy of the entire community affects your appraised value. Since, for example, the economy of Putnam County has been growing rapidly over the years, and more and more people have taken up residence here, property values within most of the County have increased.

The Property Appraiser has not created this value; he simply has the legal responsibility to discover it as it exists and appraise the property accordingly, since people make value by their transactions in the market place.