Kyle homeowners’ property valuations increases slow dramatically

Yesterday I reported on the overall property tax valuations for the City of Kyle and said those valuations increased by 7.89 percent. It appears now most of that bump is due to increases in commercial property because when I went back and asked the City’s Finance Director Perwez Moheet to give me figures on average home valuations, it turns out they only increased by 3.13 percent over the year before. That’s compared to a 17 percent increase last year.

"Based on the certified estimate for 2016 as provided by HaysCAD, the average valuation for a single-family home is $160,667 in Kyle, Texas," Moheet told me today in an e-mail. "In comparison, the 2015 average valuation for a single-family home was $155,631 in Kyle."

The 2014 number was $133,879. That’s quite a dramatic decrease in the rise of homeowner property values, from $21,752 last year to just $5,036 this year.

However, here is the positive side to those numbers: Because of residential expansion, considerably more residential property owners are paying into the pot, so the overall property tax receipts are going to be markedly higher than market valuations. Just this morning the U.S. Census Bureau released figures estimating Kyle’s population increased 8.7 percent over 2014. Now I will stipulate that we don’t know what fraction of that 8.7 percent (about 3,000 persons) are property owners but it still projects an increase in overall property tax receipts that will comfortably exceed 3.13 percent..

One other thing for homeowners to keep in mind: Although your property tax bill will go up even if the tax rate doesn’t (and I really don’t anticipate the City even considering another tax rate hike this year), only 21.73 percent, at most, of the average residential tax bill is for city taxes. The school district takes the lion’s share — about 57 percent of all the property taxes a Kyle homeowner pays goes to the Hays Consolidated School District, whether or not you have children living at home attending HCSD schools. Then there’s county taxes, ESD taxes, community college taxes, etc., but the big kahuna here is the school district. The tax bill increase for that $160,667 Kyle home this year is estimated to be $29.45 for the City of Kyle, but $77.44 for the Hays Consolidated School District.