Interested in moving your property tax basis when you sell your current home and buy the next one? For those over 55 in California, this is a great one time option.
There are actually two propositions involved. Prop 60 applies to moves within your own county, and Prop 90 relates to moves between counties which are participating in the transfer arrangement. Unfortunately, of California’s 58 counties, only 10 have the cooperative agreement to accept a property tax basis transfer from other participating counties.
Cooperating Property Tax Basis Transfer Counties (Prop 90)
The counties cooperating in the property tax basis transfer are only these, as of the date of this posting: Alameda, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Tuolumne, and Ventura.
Some of the basics for the property tax basis transfer:
- Homeowners must be 55 and older at the time of sale of the original property.
- Homeowner must be on record both for the home that’s sold and the replacement property.
- The replacement residence must be equal to or lesser in value than the original residence.
- There are special rules for multi-family (duplex, triplex, fourplex) properties and for mobile homes.
In the most typical scenario, a senior homeowner would sell a house (or townhome or condo) and “downsize” to another, less expensive, smaller house or condo. If the homeowner had been in the first property for a very long time, then the low tax rate would be hard to give up, but Props 60 and 90 enable that homeowner to go to another, less expensive home and carry the old tax rate along – one time, and either in the home county or in one of the participating counties.
I have known seniors to sell a house in Los Gatos, Saratoga or San Jose and move to The Villages or to gated senior communities out of the area but closer to their grown kids and make use of these two propositions.
It should be noted that while the price of the replacement home must be less than the home being sold, that doesn’t mean that the new home must be smaller. I’ve known people to move out of area and get a larger, newer, nicer home – at a lower price tag. So it’s really an economic downsizing (or “right sizing” as some like to say now).
For more information and to get all the details, please click on the California state page for these two propositions.
