Vancouver, Wash. – August 13, 2009 – Clark County resident and Certified General Appraiser Peter Van Nortwick today asked for the County Assessor’s office to stop over assessments and break through the unexplained delay in sending out 2010 assessments to property owners.

“When you have areas of Clark County over assessed at more than 30 percent, and county real estate prices per RealtyTrac have declined 15.4 percent over the past year, you cannot blame the unfair assessments on the falling market,” said Van Nortwick. “Having our working families unfairly over assessed is not a situation that I can stand by and continue to let happen, so I have filed with the PDC to become a candidate for the Clark County Assessor’s office.”

Over the last few years, Van Nortwick has noticed a trend where the local Assessor’s office was unfairly over assessing homes in Clark County. He started tracking how much the assessed values are above the sales price on his blog:www.stop-over-assessment.com.

In July 2009, he analyzed all the existing single-family home sales in Clark County and found that the median over assessment is 21percent. In analyzing the data, he found that the lower the price of the home, the more likely it was to be over assessed.

“The role of the Assessor is to fairly assess the property in the county and right now the homes in Clark County are unfairly over assessed. I personally appraise properties in many Washington and Oregon Counties and I have not seen the same unfair over assessments in other counties that I see in Clark County,” said Van Nortwick,. “I don’t see the same issues in Cowlitz County despite their market dropping at 12.31 percent per RealtyTrac over the past year.”

Van Nortwick wants to bring attention to the failure of the Assessor’s office to send out the new property assessments in a timely manner, during the June/July time frame like other Assessor offices around the state, and its failure to explain to the public the reason for the holdup. The delay in sending out new assessments will push back the appeals timeframe into the busy holiday season.

Van Nortwick is a Certified General Appraiser and Managing Partner of American Commercial and Residential Appraisal. His appraisal experience includes residential, commercial, recreational and agricultural appraisals. He has experience appraising properties worth tens of millions of dollars and providing expert witness testimony. He is an FHA appraiser, a member of the Clark County Board of Realtors and the Appraisal Institute. He is a board member of the Building Industry Association’s Build

the Vote Political Action Committee and a member of Leadership Clark County class of 2009-2010.