Different counties and different States have different rules and procedures for the collection of property taxes. Property taxes are generally assessed against the "estimated present assessed value of the property in question for the latest fiscal year", but that assessment can often be widely divergent depending upon a multitude of factors. Additionally to this unfortunate fact, not every piece of property pays its "fair" share or even any share of their property tax obligation. For instance, it is routine for non-profit property owners not to pay taxes, as it is for churches, governmental buildings, and educational buildings, amongst various other entities. There are also exemptions or special tax set asides for certain for-profit corporations that as part of their agreement for locating a building within a certain county, make this a negotiated condition of their doing so. Then there are certain people that earn exemptions or elimination of property taxes because they are veterans, or of a certain age group such as senior citizens, or clergymen, or the like. The only possible conclusion upon reading the foregoing and recognizing the value of this information, is that the property tax field, like so many taxes in the United States, is a very unlevel playing field, with uneven rules, and uneven application. The upshot of this is that the burden for making up for those that do not pay property taxes for whatever reason is stuck upon the shoulders of those that do not have those same privileges or exemptions. Making matters worse, is that property taxes is the foundation upon which local counties depends upon in order to make their budget, so that the powers to be within counties have a vested interest in extracting and collecting as much property tax as they can wrest away from their residents without accidently inciting and igniting a powerful fire of protest.
The thing about property taxes is that upon the buying of, for example, residential property, there is an absolute known price of what that property is worth at the time and specific date of that sale, because both parties to a sale, have a vested interest in seeing that the deal is acceptable to both. However, once that sale is made, it is a process of guesswork, some educated and some not, to determine the real present value of that property, to which tax assessors, rely heavily on factual information in regards to the property, such as the square footage, construction type, the age of the dwelling, the amount of stories, garage, acreage, and so forth. They will also periodically come out to the property, describing themselves as a "data collector" to snap pictures of the outside of your structure. From all of the foregoing, along with recent comparable sales within your neighborhood area, if applicable, the property tax assessor comes up with an assessment for your property. There are, however, fundamental flaws within this system. The first and most obvious flaw is that you really don't know how much a given property will sell for until it is actually sold; we know this because products all over America in every conceivable form are sold for a "discounted" price each and every day. The second basic flaw is that you should not judge a property from a cursory glance of its outside features, this is common sense, as the amount of people that purchase a home without doing a real home inspection of their interior, its condition, and its infrastructure, is few and far between.
When a purchase is made of a residential home, banks are often willing to extend to that qualified person, a 30-year fixed rate mortgage, which means that the buyer will know his payments for a certainty over the next 30 years to that mortgage company. Under the present system, in many counties and States within America, you will not know your future obligations for that home for property taxes, a tax which is compulsory, unless you are so fortunate as to have an exemption, and this property tax amount will be primarily controlled by government bureaucrats. In essence, this type of tax system is rife for corruption, unfairness, and unequal treatment to which it is always the "unconnected", the uninformed, and the passive believers, that are stuck paying more than their fair share in taxes to the taxman.