My father has been in a nursing home with dementia the past 4 years. I recently purchased his home. I had a realtor tour the home, provide me with a listing price, and pictures of comp. houses to support her pricing. I purchased the home based on the mean of the range she gave me. Should my father run out of funds before his death, will the selling price be reviewed by NYS and could I owe them money if they feel the price wasn't fair? His home was in Florida.
You need to be prepared to provide documentation for this too.
#1 is Tax Assessor value, that would be the local county or city tax assessor.
That seems to be what the state looks to first to find out FMV as each county / city tax assessor provides this info on all real property (homes, autos, land) to the state's database. The tax assessor statement usually goes out in Oct or Nov for taxes due the following January. The time lag allows for folks to challenge the assessed value (usually a review and then a hearing, my mom got house reduced significantly years ago due to foundation & watershed issues). See if you can find this statement in Dad's paperwork. If not, you can call assessor's office to see if they can fax or email you a copy. Some assessors have this on-line, so go there first to see if you can download (for a fee) the past years.
# 2 - licensed or certified appraisal. This is done by a professional and not the Realtor. It's viewed as a pure independent objective assessment of the property. Often when you are challenging the tax assessor value you have to pay for this to be done to have the tax assessor value changed.
The Realtor stuff has issues because so much of it is subjective even with comp's as comp's have so many differences with what the property could have been sold for, the DOM on the comps, comps not be true comps like if dad's house has only 1 bathroom but the nearest with 1 bathroom is more than 10 miles away so it;s not a true comp. Listing price is just that and not the selling price...so could be way off base. Understand?
Hopefully the tax assessor # is close to what you paid for house! Good luck.