Both Bridgton and Raymond will be going through town-wide revaluations in the new year. Contributed / John E. O’Donnell and Associates

Bridgton and Raymond will hold town-wide revaluations in 2025, the first in nine years for the former and 20 years for the latter.

According to Raymond Assessor’s Agent Curt Lebel, the Maine State Constitution requires a general valuation every decade, but it has been determined that this requirement is satisfied by annual audits. Towns tend to revaluate on two different schedules: those with part-time staffing, such as Bridgton and Raymond, running with an assessment methodology until it is no longer compliant with statutory minimums, while those with regular full-time staff are more likely to run on set intervals.

Raymond’s assessment will be conducted by KRT Appraisal of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Although this is their first time working with KRT as a company, the principal staff previously helped assess the town in 2005 as employees of Vision Appraisal. According to Lebel, since KRT has multiple projects going on at the same time, it will organize the data collection phases according to its own schedule, starting inspections at the beginning of the year and continuing through early 2026.

John E. O’Donnell’s property assessment company in New Gloucester will be in charge of revaluating Bridgton this year. Bridgton has seen three revaluations this century, in 2000, 2005 and 2016. O’Donnell’s company, which was founded by his father in 1961, has performed more than 100 revaluations since 1978, mostly in Maine.

In Raymond, inspections are likely to begin in the north part of town, working their way south over the course of the year. Lakefront properties, largely owned by nonresidents, will be the major focus of the summer months, when their owners are more likely to be in town.

During the early phases of the revaluation, for the next 10-12 months, data collecting agents for KRT will visit every property in town and measure physical attributes, followed by field appraisers who will set up the grade and conditions of the homes. Lebel said that there should only be one or two appraisers throughout the process to ensure consistency. As sales come in over the next one and a half years, KRT will begin to develop a valuation model based on the market sales price of similar properties.

For this revaluation, O’Donnell will look at properties sold in the past few years. Unlike in Raymond, assessors will not be sent to each individual property, as they already assess more than 600 properties in the town annually, and values taken from visits in 2024 will be used for the 2025 revaluation. O’Donnell expects the process of assessment to be completed much sooner, just before the town typically commits taxes in mid- to late-July.

Individual preliminary values will be issued to taxpayers and property owners around June 2026, followed by a period where taxpayers will have informal hearings with KRT. Once the hearing process is completed, the town will implement a normal tax commitment for the year with the new values.

Lebel also said although property values may increase, that may not result in a significant increase in property taxes. If taxes increase across the board and the budget stays relatively stable, the tax rate could decrease.

Since the pandemic, communities across Maine have seen a massive increase in housing prices, with current assessments producing values that are 40-50% of market value. If prices continue to rise, Lebel said, it’s conceivable that property valuations would double, halving tax rates.

Lebel said that waterfront property, which tends to be more scarce and valuable, has appreciated at a faster rate than non-waterfront property, often shifting tax rates onto non-waterfront property. Thus far, Lebel hasn’t seen major shifting in his data, noting that interior property all the way up through central Maine has increased at a similar rate to waterfront due to the relocation of remote workers. Nevertheless, with several uncertainties in the market, a lot could change over the next year that could affect the revaluation, he said. Given the 20-year gap between revaluations, he also predicted that there could be a lot of isolated changes on individual properties.

O’Donnell also noted the tendency of towns to hold revaluations at irregular intervals, and said that the amount that values change in a revaluation has a lot to do with the values they have in place at the time. The assessed values Bridgton has now are from 2017, and if one was to look at how much real estate values have changed in Bridgton over the past nine years, they would get an idea of how much the assessment would go up, he said. He noted that almost all classes of real estate have likely increased in value, but that there could be huge variation between different classes.

He also talked about potential concerns that towns might have regarding revaluation, particularly related to tax increases. Many people fear that revaluation is a money grab meant to increase taxes, he said. Although O’Donnell said that this was inaccurate, that notion encourages towns to avoid revaluation. He said revaluation is about market fairness, where towns that regularly update their values have fairer taxes.

“If you think about towns that act like clockwork,” said O’ Donnell, “it’s generally speaking going to be better and fairer than to wait 10 or 15 years.”