"It's crazy," Zenobi said. "You want to buy it?"
Four years in the making, the so-called Actual Value Initiative is supposed to be the solution to the BRT's unfair and confusing assessments, long considered among the least accurate in the nation. The idea is simple: Every property's assessment would be the same as its value in the marketplace.
But on its first try to correctly assess the city's 25,000 commercial parcels - properties responsible for nearly 30 percent of Philadelphia's property-tax revenue - the BRT fell far short, an Inquirer review shows.
Scores of properties, such as Zenobi's yard, would be incredibly overvalued. Others are so low that even the owners say they're absurd.
The attempt to repair the values suffers from the same failings that have plagued the agency for decades: mistakes in property records, sloppiness in computer calculations, and assessors who used crude shortcuts instead of standard reappraisal methods, the review shows.
Among the findings:
Hundreds of the new commercial numbers were thrown off by mistakes littering the BRT's property records, including incorrectly sized lots and buildings that don't exist. At Seventh and Arch Streets, for example, the BRT calculated a new value of $5.2 million on what the agency thought was a huge, 200-space parking lot. But there is no such lot, just a narrow walkway next to the Federal Detention Center.
Instead of trying to figure out a property's real worth, the BRT's assessors slapped the same percentage increases on thousands of parcels across the city. More than 500 would get the same 40 percent increase - properties as different as a $6 million shopping center on Castor Avenue and a long-empty hoagie shop in North Philadelphia.
