Consider a family eanrs $100,000 / yr (gross), and owns a property that costs $350,000.

Tax-wise, you’d expect this:

MA Income Tax = $5,000
MA Real Estate Tax = $2,500
MA Sales tax = 5%

MA Tax burden = $7,500

TX Income Tax = $0
TX Real Estate Tax = $8,500
TX Sales tax = 8.75%

TX Tax burden = $8,500

If you then look at the cost to drive various roads in TX — the cost goes up again. Yes, MA has the Turnpike, and a couple of bridges. But Dallas has the PGBT, the Tollway, etc — and the cost to drive the same mileage is much higher in TX than it is in MA.

Also, MA has much better public transit. The DART isn’t very useful, unless you live along US-75; so people are forced to own cars and crowd the roads more.

The higher one’s income becomes — the more beneficial it becomes to live in TX (which explains why TX has the highest influx of millionaire households of any region in the US).

The reverse holds as well — the lower one’s income the more beneficial it becomes to live in MA.

So, for the “average Joe” — TX is just not the great deal that most people seem to believe it to be (strictly from a tax burden point of view).

Cheers

Isn’t the TX state legislature already considering requiring disclosure? TX is in the minority as a state that is non-disclosure.

As for the private nature of Texans — well, move somewhere else then if disclosure becomes law.

Disclosure can have funny affects on people — feed a market that is in the midst of a giant speculative bubble; or feed a market that is in the midst of a post-bubble collapse. Its up to everyone using the information to use it wisely.

From a legislative perspective though — I think that the state would want to know *exactly* what people are paying for their homes so that they can maximize tax revenues.

And I have to say, after living in MA (nicknamed Tax-achussetts) for a long time. I think everyone has it backwards — TX is misspelled; its really Tax-as…

I think that the only people hurt by disclosure are those affiliated with the NAR and the stranglehold they’re trying to maintain on (what I feel is) public information. The more information that can be taken out of the hands of a few, and distributed equally to the many — the better off we’ll all be (which, is what Zillow, RedFin, etc are all attempting to achieve).

Cheers!

Zillow certainly supports and would encourage a change towards disclosure in those few states that currently don’t require disclosure of property transactions. Zestimate accuracy would absolutely improve in Texas if this happened but that’s obviously not the reason to argue for this change. This debate should rather focus on the improved liquidity and governance of the Texas RE market if transactions were public records.

FYI – you’ll find the Zillow Home Value Reports for Dallas here:
http://tinyurl.com/5wcvou
http://tinyurl.com/57s8rr

Good luck.

However, having spent some time in a state where Zillow has a lot of info, I still can’t say that their values are generally even close to accurate unless the home sells once a year.

My old home still lists as “recently sold”, even though the sale will be a year old soon. That said, I believe the 12% reduction in value since then is probably accurate, given where it is. However, the sale price was itself 10% below what Zillow said it should have been at the time of the sale and 20% below the high a year before.