Suffolk County Property Tax Assessment Information

Suffolk County Statistics

Suffolk is an overwhelmingly residential County ‐ about 79% ‐ and has more vacant parcels (10%) than commercial and industrial combined (7%).

Source NYS ORPTS Muni Pro Website, Suffolk County Distribution of Parcels by Property Class

Residential Assessment Ratios

A Residential Assessment Ratio is a "measurement of the overall ratio of the total assessed value of residential property in the municipality compared to the full market value."

It is this percentage of full market value that is used to determine a residential property's assessed value.

How Stale is this Roll?

The records apparently only go back to 1974, when the hall of records mysteriously blew away.

More than a few Towns in Suffolk County are going on 50 years ‐ or more ‐ since their most recent reassessment (pdf).

There isn't a tremendous amount of change from year to year most of the Assessment Rolls, except for new construction, properties with permitted work, and those granted reductions.

* Property Class 210, rounded down.

Analyzing Granted Reductions

Study the Past if You Would Define the Future
‐Confucius

‐‐Shane M. Coyle

One of the research techniques we employ involves investigating recently granted reductions, looking for patterns and trends.

We can then review the historical sales data from that period to compare it with current metrics and ascertain whether a trend is likely to continue or possibly intensify.

Granted Reductions Map ‐ Brookhaven

Light blue are 2021 reductions, Navy blue are 2022.

Last year (2023) , there were fewer than 1400 reductions granted on single‐family homes in the Town of Brookhaven.

This total was up slightly from the previous year's 1250 or so, which was down sharply from about 2000 year prior to that.

For reference, there's a total of about 120,000 such properties in the Town, meaning only between about 1% to 1.7% of single family homes were granted reductions over the last 3 years.

Just based on the map, does there appear to be any pattern?

Brookhaven Granted Reductions By School District

We can also analyze reductions by School District; after all, School District plays an important role in Long Island Real Estate markets‐ to analyze sales trends without factoring for School District wouldn't make any sense.

School Taxes make up the majority of property owners' tax bills, it doesn't make sense to analyze Property Taxes in Suffolk County without regard to these trends, either.

Visualizations Provide Insight

Sometimes it's easy to miss an interesting number is a sea of numbers, this is where visualization of statistical data can be instructive.

If it didn't jump out at you, let me just take a second to point out Three Village School District‐ it has consistently been the area of most reductions granted in the Town of Brookhaven over that time period, the bar chart may make that more clear.

Over the last 3 years, each year more reductions were granted in Three Village than just about* any other School District's total for the last 3 years combined!

The three year totals for Miller Place (392) and William Floyd (395) edge out 2022 in Three Village (387).

Determining Continuing Trends

A glance at this year's market data indicates that the pattern seems to be continuing, with Setauket and East Setauket showing the greatest deviation above the PTA mean Sales Ratio in Brookhaven during 2023 of about 0.00485.

As evidenced in the map, and confirmed by ongoing data collection, the north shore in general has seen a prolonged period of market values not advancing at the same rate as Assessment Levels.