The Assessor's Office really, we provide real estate services for the city of Fargo.
Our primary deliverable to the city is our assessment role, which consists of all the
parcels in the city, their legal description, their ownership, their tax classification
and of course their property value, which in the end is our job.
We try to make sure that the assessments are fair for everyone by monitoring the market
on a regular basis, by going out and making sure that our information is accurate.
And then we also do comparison of properties to each other.
We try to compare them apples to apples as much as possible so that we are valuing similar
properties in a similar way.
There's secondary benefits that come from the work we do here in our office, both internally
and externally.
Our data is used by many departments here in the city.
Our property data is very valuable to our planning department, our engineering department,
our auditor's department and even our inspections department.
And of course, there's other benefits as well to external stakeholders that our data provides.
Our data is very valuable to the local real estate market.
That includes real estate appraisers, lenders, real estate agents and even title companies.
I don't think that the real estate market here in Fargo could function as it does without
our assessment and property data.
There's many factors that are involved in the valuation of a property.
The primary one would be location.
Other factors that would affect how we value a property would be the size, the bedroom
and bathroom count, garage stalls, things along those lines.
The property tax is a local tax.
Roughly 99% of your property tax bill stays here within Cass County.
Within the city of Fargo, about 20% of your property tax bill goes to fund city services.
That includes your police department, your fire department, making sure the roads get
out in the winter and fixed in the summertime.
It funds our public health services and it funds our library services, among many other
things that the city provides to our citizens.
So we have a lot of information available on the city website.
ParcelParsals.com is probably the most heavily trafficked URL on the city website.
There you can search parcel information by address or parcel number and we provide basic
information on the parcel property data along with several years worth of value and also
special assessment information.
One thing I'd really like to highlight is our office's effort to put our exemption applications
online.
For years, these applications were mailed out and people had to complete sometimes multiple
applications and mail them back.
We've been working over the past several years to get all of these applications on
our website and available for the public.
We're hoping that this process makes it more convenient for both the public and more efficient
for us.
If there's one thing I would want the city of Fargo to know is that our office is an
office of professional appraisers and we work very hard for the citizens to try and give
them value for the work that we do.
We also try to be as professional and courteous as we can in delivering the product that we
have for the citizens and we know that we work for the city of Fargo and that we try
to work as hard as we can for the citizens.