Real-Estate Roulette

Of the 400,000 homeowners in Philadelphia, only 3 percent receive property-tax bills based on the true value of their real estate.

For the remaining 387,000, the amounts they are charged are wrong, and often wildly so - derived from assessments that, on average, are 39 percent off the mark, according to an analysis by The Inquirer.

The appraisals border on the randomness of Ping-Pong balls popped from a lottery machine, with winners and losers.

The neighborhoods where assessments are too high, and residents pay too much, include some of the poorest in the city. The most egregiously overassessed houses typically have market values under $69,000; their owners are overbilled $116, on average. The inflated appraisals, however, are not limited to distressed blocks. Nearly the entire Northeast, Mount Airy and Olney are overassessed.

Neighborhoods in the southern half of the city - with the notable exception of Southwest Philadelphia - are generally underassessed and homeowners undercharged. On the price scale, the properties with the most flagrantly lowball assessments tend to be above $200,000; those taxpayers get an average break of about $500 a year.

When Pennsylvania rated the accuracy of assessments in its 67 counties two years ago, the four adjacent to Philadelphia were in the top third. Chester County was No. 3 and Montgomery County No. 6, even though they had not conducted mass reappraisals since 1998.

Philadelphia came in 47th - startlingly low considering that, at least in theory, it reassesses annually and should have the most up-to-date values.

Last summer, in an exceptional push, 80 percent of all properties in the city were reappraised. The stated intent was to fix the increasingly glaring errors that were drawing fire from homeowners all over the city, who have complained that they could make no sense of the numbers or judge whether their bills were fair.

The new assessments, however, are just about as fallacious as the previous figures.

"They are so out of whack, it's unbelievable," said Robert P. Strauss, a property-tax expert and professor of economics and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

At The Inquirer's request, Strauss and Kevin Gillen, a real estate expert at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, conducted separate analyses of Philadelphia appraisals. The results of both studies were similar to The Inquirer's.