How to read a West Michigan parcel record

The county assessor's parcel record is the closest thing to a canonical description of a property, and it is free to anybody who asks. It is also written by assessors for assessors, which is why so much of it gets misread by everybody else.

Michigan's assessed value, the state equalized value or SEV, is meant to approximate half of the property's true cash value. Double it and you have the assessor's opinion of market value, which is a rough opinion, arrived at by mass appraisal rather than by walking through the house.

Taxable value is a different figure entirely. Since Proposal A passed in 1994, taxable value rises each year by the lesser of inflation or five percent, regardless of what the market does, until the property transfers. In the year after a transfer of ownership it uncaps and resets to the assessed value.

That uncapping is the single most common financial surprise in Michigan residential real estate. On a home held for twenty years in a market that has doubled, the gap between taxable and assessed value can be six figures, and the buyer's first tax bill can be twice the seller's last one.

So: never estimate your tax bill from the seller's. Take the assessed value, apply the millage rate for the taxing jurisdiction, and budget from that. The lookup on this site shows both figures side by side and states the gap, precisely because a listing that quotes the seller's current bill is quoting a number that is about to stop existing.

A property claimed as the owner's principal residence is exempt from 18 mills of school operating tax. A second home, a cottage or a rental is not, and 18 mills is a large number: on a $300,000 taxable value it is $5,400 a year.

The record shows the current exemption percentage. A cottage bought from someone who lived in it full time will be taxed very differently than it was, and the same is true in reverse: a buyer moving into a property that was previously a rental will see the bill fall, provided they file the affidavit by the deadline. Filing it is the buyer's job and nobody else's.

The acreage on a parcel record is derived from the assessor's mapping, which is derived from the legal description, which on rural West Michigan property may be a metes-and-bounds call written a century ago referencing a stake, a fence line or a tree that no longer exists.

It is a good number. It is not a survey and it is not a boundary. Where the difference matters, whether that is a fence line, a shared driveway, a lakefront frontage figure that determines riparian rights, a lot split that turns on whether the parcel is really 10.02 acres, the answer costs a few hundred dollars and comes from a licensed surveyor. Buying a boundary dispute is a genuinely miserable way to start in a new house.

It is also worth reading the legal description itself rather than skipping it. "EXC THE W 3 FT" or a reference to an easement recorded in a particular liber and page is the kind of detail that explains why the driveway is where it is.

The classification (residential improved, residential vacant, agricultural, commercial, industrial) is the assessor's category for valuation purposes and it is not the same thing as zoning. A parcel can be classified agricultural and zoned residential, or the reverse.

Classification matters anyway, for two reasons. Agricultural classification may carry a qualified agricultural exemption from the school operating millage. And land enrolled in Michigan's Farmland and Open Space Preservation programme, a PA 116 agreement, carries a tax benefit and a recapture penalty on withdrawal that can be substantial. That enrolment does not appear on the parcel record in every county and is worth asking about directly on any agricultural land.

This is the more useful list, because it is the one nobody publishes:

• Sale price. Michigan is a non-disclosure state for most purposes; some counties publish transfer data, most do not, and none of the four counties this site reads publish a reliable price history.
• Chain of title, easements, deed restrictions and covenants. All of that lives at the Register of Deeds and is found by a title search, not by an assessor.
• Liens, mortgages and judgments. Same answer.
• Permit history and open permits. Municipal building department.
• Septic and well records. County health department.
• Anything about the condition of the building.

Kent, Ottawa, Muskegon and Allegan publish parcel services that this site queries live, along with seventeen more Michigan counties. Field names differ in every one of them, and the parcel identifier alone goes by a dozen different names across the state, which is why the lookup normalises them into one shape before reporting.

Where the closest parcel record is the abutting lot rather than the point searched, the report says so explicitly rather than presenting the neighbour's figures as yours. That happens on new construction, on recently split parcels, and anywhere the geocoder puts a pin a few metres off.