Law Requirements

The Wisconsin State Law requires that all assessments:

• Are valued at 100% of Market Value
• Are equitable within each class or property

Assessed values must closely reflect actual market value following a revaluation. In non-revaluation years, assessments typically reflect a percent of market value due to changing market conditions.

Market Value

Market value is defined as the amount a typical, well-informed buyer would be willing to pay for a property under typical market conditions. Typical conditions include:

• Buyer and seller being unrelated
• Seller willing to sell but not under undue pressure to sell
• Buyer willing to buy but not under obligation to buy
• Property must be on the open market for a reasonable length of time
• Payment must be in cash or its equivalent with typical market-place financing

If these conditions are present, this could be an arms-length sale and be representative of actual market value.

Objective of the Assessor

Property assessment is the process of valuing all taxable real and personal property in a municipality for the purpose of creating equitable assessments at market value. The basic objective of the Assessor is to achieve equity in the assessments so each property only bears its fair share of the property tax burden.

Multiple Assessments

If you recently bought property and it was assessed at the time of the purchase, it may need to be assessed again. This is because it was most likely appraised for your lender not assessed by our department. However, we do request to inspect all new sales. We do this to verify our records and to gather pertinent information regarding the sale. This typically is done several months after the actual sale.