It's probably location -specific. I know in our city, they appraise house values in January, so, if your house is not standing in January (or they don't know to look for it -- if it's a new build), then you won't pay property tax until it hits the book in the new year, and is assessed the following January.

Where I am they do an assessment each April (or so). The day the do the assessment is the day the fix he percent complete you are. That is what sets your tax for the next year. Closing has nothing to do with it. Hypothetically, if you owned your land on the date of assessment and no building was done, your taxes for the next year would be based on the land only. If your house was half done it would be based on half the structure value plus the land value. There is no way to completely avoid taxes unless you have an odd arrangement with the seller because even if you close on the land before the assessment date, as part of the closing the pro-rated portion of the taxes would be paid by you.

Ah that makes sense. It seemed to good to be true that we could put off closing for a month to avoid a year of property taxes on the completed home!

Check with your builder and your local taxing authority. In Florida the real estate tax year is Jan 1-Dec 31. In our county the Assessor tries to squeeze in some addtional revenue by checking new construction through January 16. If the Certificate of Occupancy has not been issued, and if there is a reason it could not be issued, the tax is on the unimproved property - not the % of completion of the new build.

Our tax year begins Oct 1st. Does your county not have a website? You could look it up.

As mentioned above, location specific.

Since I usually build my own homes, and no CO is required, I put off final inspection as long as possible. It has saved me as much as six months of taxes on the "improvements" portion of the tax bill.

DIY'ers don't face property tax increases especially if they are smart enough to avoid pulling of permits only when absolutely necessary.

^^^@mcgoverntheory - great attitude. Let's all try and cheat the system so funding for the public good is compromised. You pulled up a 9 year old thread to tell us that and I'm guessing the message is the same in the other old tax thread that bumped up.

DLM2000 - lots of posts and inane comments. Don't feed the troll.

Troll alert. He's been posting (and deleting) some pretty silly threads and comments over the last few days.

I flagged it too.