[iagovar]

Im +30 in Spain and I thought the demographic winter would land some great opportunities to buy a home. But looking into some deserted municipalities everything keeps being expensive, despite the extremely low demand (and I know this because I scrape the listings and track em). If I want to buy a shitty house that needs restoration I'm investing over 200k. Not to mention that the land registry holds values way above the market, so even if If I was able to buy for 1€ I would be paying taxes over 100k or whatever the value.

If you talk to some owners they seem to not care. Yeah they know that their property is falling apart but they won't sell under $value because they bought it at that price or similar reasonings.

So as an individual, what can I do? I don't want to be renting my whole life, I actually want to buy property but the market just doesn't adjust for some reasons. Remember we're talking about Spain, where the job market is shit, and the economy just can't keep up with the events.

[bryanlarsen]

Or you could just wait. A lot of people have been surprised that the housing market hasn't crashed. Two of the theories are:

1: supply is more elastic than demand. In other words, more sellers took potential listings off the market than buyers stopped looking.

2: governments printing money inflated investor assets like stocks and real estate.

If these are true, a backlog of listings from could flood the market next year, and the government money printing machine should turn off too. So perhaps the real estate adjustment has just been delayed.

But who knows, predicting what the market is going to in these crazy time is a mug's game.

[onion2k]

Over the past 30 years buy-to-let has fundamentally changed the housing market to the point where I honestly don't believe there'll ever be a housing market crash again. Rich people will buy up all the available housing stock to rent out (or to AirBnB) if there's a small price drop. That will stop there ever being a big price drop.

Barring a sea change in housing policy that enables massive amounts of new houses to be built, I would make a significant wager that in 50 years time about 75% of people will rent their home all their life.

[api]

Add to this the fact that governments (at least in the US, and in many other countries) have made it clear that housing won't be allowed to fall. This combined with money printing means the price is almost guaranteed to rise.

The reason is that for most homeowners their home equity is the majority of their savings, and homeowners vote in higher proportion than renters (on average). Any politician that allows home values to fall too much will be facing the end of their career.

Under these conditions the only way housing will fall in a lasting way is if something so terrible happens to the economy that... well... you'll have bigger problems than housing.

Housing is fundamentally broken and very hard to fix due to vested interests all over the place. "Housing cannot simultaneously be affordable and a good investment," and we've clearly decided that housing is a financial instrument first and a place to live second.

There is one way out of the housing price trap: telework plus ubiquitous broadband via things like 5G and Starlink. That could allow people to escape the housing trap by locating away from price hotspots. If you simply must live in a big city this won't work for you, but keep in mind that you could always live somewhere more rural and visit big cities any time you please.

[pantalaimon]

> There is one way out of the housing price trap: telework plus ubiquitous broadband via things like 5G and Starlink.

I don’t buy that. People don’t like to live in cities primarily because of jobs, but because living in cities is fun. People like to be close to other people, exchange with others and their community.

Living in a small town sounds depressing to me, no matter how fast the internet connection might be.

Maybe if you create your own commune, bring in a social circle from the city. But that has a tendency to fall apart.

[mr_toad]

> People don’t like to live in cities primarily because of jobs, but because living in cities is fun.

This is mostly only true of younger childless people. Once you have kids you can forget about having any fun for the next 15 years or so. And after that, well, how many 45 year olds do you see in nightclubs?

[cyberdrunk]

Fun is more than nightclubs. Where I live, I have fun just by walking the streets, admiring the varied and pretty architecture (granted, I live in Poland), seeing the various characters which walk the streets, eating/having snacks at the many food outlets available etc. In a rural setting, you exchange all that for easy access to a lot of nature.

[api]

It's your choice. Trouble is that if you stay in a city under the current housing finance regime it will be a lot harder to build wealth. A lot will get eaten by rent or mortgage.

[JKCalhoun]

How has it been made clear that housing won't be allowed to fall? The held-low interest rates?

[anthk]

The more they keep the artificial prices, the harder will be the fall. You'll see that, and 1929 would be a child's play compared to that.

[swimfar]

"housing policy that enables massive amounts of new houses to be built"

I think you mean "new homes". I don't think there's anywhere in the US with a housing crisis is due to new houses not being allowed. It's usually due to the difficulty in tearing down houses (and low-density apartments) and building higher density apartments. This may seem pedantic, but in these discussions the distinction is important. In almost every housing-related thread on HN, I see people using them interchangeably, in ways that are confusing.

[jefftk]

I'm not sure what distinction you're getting at? I'm in Somerville Massachusetts, houses are very expensive, and the land is all built out. If you tore down a house, you would not be able to build as large a house in its place, in almost all circumstances. You definitely couldn't build a bigger one. What are you trying to get at with "new houses" versus "new homes"?

[cortesoft]

You could if you built a multistory apartment complex.

[my_username_is_]

Most housing in Somerville, and lots of the urban northeast, is made up of multistory apartments (sometimes referred to as "three deckers")

[an_opabinia]

It’s funny because barely any houses in Somerville are up to code. It’s like less than 5%. So the regulations have achieved a double nothing.

[jefftk]

The regulations came into place after Somerville was almost entirely built out. What they achieved was preventing additional building, which may or may not have been the intent.

[david927]

My feeling is that the pandemic and impending economic collapse will change that.

Remember when the 2008 crisis hit, no one was buying but no one was renting either. And a lot of banks with real estate on their books just let it sit there (where it sits today).

Once a the credit default domino chain starts to fall, people and organization will need to get liquid. The first stage will see some people jump in on pent-up demand but after that, real estate will fall through the floor. It will literally drop to near nothing in places.

[benrbray]

> no one was buying but no one was renting either.

As someone who was in eighth grade at the time, can you clarify what you mean by this? Every person either 1) buys property, 2) rents property, 3) goes homeless, or 4) dies. There aren't really any other choices.

[david927]

You're not alone -- it was quite surprising to a lot of people! What happened was the fifth option: move in with others, such as parents.

P.S. I just saw this article:

Mortgage Delinquencies Have Risen Fastest In US History

https://thewashingtonstandard.com/housing-crash-2-0-mortgage...

[tingletech]

from the point of view of the owner of an empty housing unit, if no one is buying and no one is renting then you are just left paying property tax and maintenance on an empty unit.

But, at least in my local market, it would surprise if the banks are sitting on empty units from 2008, as far as I know it all got auctioned off years ago.

This article predicts the covid crisis will center around a new collateralized debt instrument "[after post 2008 banking reform] [d]emand shifted to a similar—and similarly risky—instrument, one that even has a similar name: the CLO, or collateralized loan obligation. A CLO walks and talks like a CDO, but in place of loans made to home buyers are loans made to businesses—specifically, troubled businesses." https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/coronav... discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23480680

[ArekDymalski]

Some additional options: staying with your parents; inheriting the property; marrying someone who owns a property.

[dasloop]

You can share so less people rent or going back to your parents place (common in Spain for example, in where families use to live in the same city)

[barnesto]

Millions of people live in a van (#vanlife) or RV. You can work from anywhere and when the sights get boring you drive to the next place.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

It can be pretty awesome.

For a while.

For a lifetime? I think not.

ps. I've done 9 months/6 months/3 months in my van with my wife. We love it, but it's not a home, it's a journey.

[cortesoft]

5) pack more people into the house and split rent

[benrbray]

Still technically renting, though :)

[freeone3000]

(3) and (4) have nearly infinite growth potential.

[JKCalhoun]

If banks let real estate sit on their books, why did the real estate market crash? I remember seeing whole neighborhoods of new homes in Las Vegas going for $100K just to move them.

[david927]

It wasn't all real estate for all banks, and individuals were getting out, of course.

[adventured]

> Or you could just wait. ... 2: governments printing money inflated investor assets like stocks and real estate.

Waiting will only help modestly. In the meantime, while you wait, your purchasing power is being destroyed, which is likely to put you in an at-best net break-even scenario on waiting.

2a) Asset prices - such as housing - have been permanently adjusted higher because the real standard of living, the real value of the currencies in question (USD and Euro in this case) have been debased by the central banks and their wildly aggressive 'printing.'

Skeptical? You can see this vividly in the permanently set higher price of things like gold, oil, platinum, copper, silver. Gold isn't going back to $200 or $400 ever again. A gallon of milk will never be $0.25 again. Housing isn't going back, either. What you're seeing are permanently higher lows and higher highs on housing prices, as the currencies are getting destroyed. The average person can't outrun the destruction, only people with liquid assets can attempt to keep up. That isn't to say there can't be a drop in real-estate prices, rather, it's to say that the drop won't roll prices back to a prior band/range.

Occasionally we get a very dramatic demonstration of this destruction in action, as in ~2003-2007, the commodity bubble, caused by the disastrous US financial policies during the Bush years, which smashed the dollar and sent everything else soaring when priced in dollars (also nicely represented in the extreme skyrocketing in GDPs - when priced in dollars - in every other nation on the planet at exactly the same time; eg Czech's GDP went up 300% in just seven years, 2002-2008, priced in dollars; needless to say, their economy didn't actually expand by 300% in that time, that was the USD imploding).

The US has seen very modest real growth over the last 20 years, and a lot of inflation (housing, healthcare, education, vehicles, maintenance costs, etc.). Most people can't keep up with the asset inflation vs their incomes. The same is true in most of Europe, the EU has seen net zero growth for about ~13-14 years now (and that's ignoring the setback from the virus). People can only tolerate this situation for so long before you get hefty civil unrest or political revolution, we've prominently seen a taste of it in the US and France, and elsewhere.

Do you know why software developers are now earning a median of $110,000 per year in the US? Because they're one of the few segments keeping up with inflation at all (thanks to the super fat margins in the industry and global reach of US tech). $70,000 in 2000 is about equal to $110,000 today (and that's a poor adjustment, because major costs like education & healthcare & housing have soared over that time). Or price it in gold over time (up 500%+ since 2000), and then you'll see, the software developers are actually struggling to keep up, and everyone else is de facto drowning.

[mrnobody_67]

ShadowStats.com tracks the Consumer Price Index according to the old 1980 and 1990 methodologies.... 6% or 10% annually vs. less than 2% under the current CPI index.

[lifeisstillgood]

I have long suspected this- thank you ...

[lifeisstillgood]

This is horribly depressing but hard to argue against. Do you have further reading?

[dmurray]

Move to Italy and buy one of the €1 houses in the article? The language is easy for you, and depending where you are in Spain, it might be a closer move than to other parts of Spain.

Of course there's a catch, but if what you really want is to own your own home and you're flexible about where you live, you're the right person for this kind of initiative.

[jandrese]

There's usually a catch to these effectively free real estate deals. Like the home is a registered historic site so you're on the hook for tens or hundreds of thousands in maintenance that all has to be approved by some council of greybeards who won't accept anything that isn't made in exactly the same way it was 500 years ago. "These replacement stones were worked with power tools, they've lost their authenticity!"

By the way the land is on a consecrated ancient battlefield/holy site, so you can't put a shovel in it without a full archeological review.

[MrFoof]

The most common catches I'm aware of (doing some research) are:

* Some towns have a requirement that you start a small business to qualify.

* In some towns the houses are auctioned with a starting bid of one Euro. The nicest ones will get bid up a fair bit, but a lot of them close for one to five thousand euro. The nicest ones (minimal renovation required) can close for up to twenty-five thousand euros.

* Often a refundable deposit of two to five thousand euros is required, with the catch that you start moving in or renovating within a year and complete moving in and/or renovating within three years.

* The houses are often long abandoned. Renovation costs are going to be what they are -- significant -- so you best be handy, as you can cut your renovation costs by 80-90% if you eliminate labor costs. Regardless, your renovations will need to be approved.

* Tax contracts and real estate closing costs, which will typically be a few (as in, around 2 to 3) thousand euros.

[jacquesm]

Or where they will require that certain companies or people are doing the work because that's the only way they will be satisfied. Never mind that these are overpriced, deliver crap work or both, you won't get a permit in any other way. The best outcome is you pay them to stay away.

This happens in other places as well (Portugal, Spain).

[obmelvin]

This is a very valid point. As someone with an Italian step-dad who's dealt with property in Italy, I can say that dealing with permits etc in Italy is really not easy. Things really do work their own, Italian, way. It's not the same as real estate in the US, even if you are comparing historic regulations here to there.

Guess I don't really have a point to this comment, other than to say this parent comment might sound like an extreme exaggeration but AFAIK it isn't.

edit: looks like jacquesm has made a similar point

[iagovar]

If I emigrate I would do for the money, It doesn't make sense from my POV to go to a tiny town in a country I don't know, leaving behind my friends an relatives. The same applies for everywhere else.

[imtringued]

I think you're dismissing the tax implications too easily. Unless they are waiving the taxes you're still going to pay a at least 10k€ just for the title change alone.

[TheGallopedHigh]

There are more properties available in Italy that would not likely require 200k button the order of 10s of thousands. Maybe that’s your ticket?

[ido]

Heck, there are a lot of properties in Germany (where there are actually jobs) that would require less than €200k.

People here say these are remote but that is really mostly just how "spoiled" (in quotes because I'm "spoiled" that way too!) Germans are with commute. You can be 1 hour drive away (including traffic) from many fairly central places in Berlin & have very cheap housing outside the city (partially this is because traffic is actually not that bad in Berlin & partially because it's in the middle of an otherwise fairly empty & large plain[0]).

In comparison nowhere within reasonable 1 hour drive from central London is cheap, nor from SF/LA/NYC or heck even Tel Aviv.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_European_Plain

[zelos]

> within reasonable 1 hour drive from central London is cheap

1hr drive from central London is probably still in central London, though ;-)

1hr train from London gets you to areas where a reasonable 3 bed semi is ~£300k I guess.

[MagnumOpus]

You'd be surprised. 1hr commute from London in reality is 40 minutes on the train (10 minutes walk either side, even getting out of a major train station takes that long). And 40 minutes ride from central London is Sevenoaks, Reading, St. Albans, and zone 6 commuter towns like Amersham or Borehamwood -- your 3-bed semi will still cost you half a million pounds if not much more. (Thanks to the NIMBY policy that designated dozens square miles of farms inside the M25 as "green belt" and dozens more as private golf courses...)

[imtringued]

Germany is a good choice. Very low cost of living relative to job opportunities.

[amzans]

Only if you rent or stay far away from the hotspots. Germany has one of the lowest home ownership rates recorded at 41%.

In Munich, an average <80m2 apartment 40+ minutes away from the city center costs around 640K EUR. And if you're looking at a decent detached house we're talking about a million at the very least.

Unfortunately doesn't add up when salaries in tech are 55-85k EUR, with net income somewhere around half of that.

But yes, outside of purchasing real estate, cost of living is pretty good relative to quality of life.

[ido]

Right but Munich is the worst in all of Germany, rather than a typical example. It's like quoting SFBA housing costs as an example for the US.

[walrus01]

I would not say that 2 hours of driving every day is affordable, if you calculate the fully-loaded euros per km cost of owning, maintaining, fueling, insurance and operating a vehicle, how many km you would put on it every work week, and the cost of paying for parking in the urban center. 0.75 euro cents per km would not be an unreasonable figure.

[ChuckNorris89]

>Heck, there are a lot of properties in Germany (where there are actually jobs) that would require less than €200k

Do you have any examples? I could never find anything larger than a matchbox in a village for under $200k in Germany.

Anything decent I found in the outskirts of any big city was over 500k.

[ido]

The first thing is to look in places without good transit as germans (reasonably!) prefer those. The moment it requires owning a car anything outside Berlin (so in Brandenburg) will be affordable.

Here's a quick search for houses under €100k with at least 100m^2 and 3 rooms (2BR) in Brandenburg: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/Suche/de/brandenburg/guenst...

It returns 83 results & while not all of them are within 1 hour drive from Berlin, at least a bunch of them are.

Also if you're in the affluent south or west of the country (which I suspect is where you searched?) you will have far fewer options for cheap housing than in the depopulated former East-Germany around Berlin. You definitely can't repeat this "trick" outside of Munich.

[ChuckNorris89]

No offense, but those places are cheap because nobody wants to live there and for good reason. It looks much worse than Eastern Europe.

Nobody in their right mind would want their kids growing up there.

In family friendly places with jobs the properties are far from cheap.

[ido]

That's why I don't live there! But the topic we're attached to is "1-Euro Houses" and that's exactly the kind of places you'd find these in Italy or Spain as well - depressed rural/small-towns with no jobs and where all the young people moved to the cities.

Also not sure what counts as looking bad to you, a lot of these villages or small cities are actually quite nice looking (we often go to such places for a day trip) & if I was single/childless and wanted to live a quiet life without much disturbance I'd definitely check them out. They are mostly just not in easy commuting distance to jobs.

In fact some of the places in Berlin with the highest rents (like Kreuzberg) are often a lot uglier than sleepy Brandenburg villages & small towns.

[jacquesm]

Near the Dutch German border there are plenty of houses that are affordable, well under 200K. Don't cross that border though, then prices will skyrocket.

[melvinroest]

Hey, are you up for chatting more about Berlin houses? I'm Dutch and my German is ... not too great. But I am mildly interested in it. So if you're up for it, my email is in my profile.

[ido]

does this reply answer your questions? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24198125

[melvinroest]

Hey, thanks, it does.

Why is the east side cheaper? I mean, I know it was occupied by the Soviet Union back in the day, but why is it still cheaper there now?

[ido]

Lots of free space! Look at how relatively sparsely populated the area around Berlin is: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6e/Pop_dens...

Germany has a very low fertility rate & even immigration isn't enough to make the population grow more than very slowly so if a lot of people moved westwards and into the cities it means a lot of people moved out of the east and the country side.

Also almost the entire country is fairly flat & with a mild climate.

[novok]

So property taxes aren't high enough to encourage them to rent or sell out the properties?

[closeparen]

Usually the owner hasn't been paying taxes, and the back taxes become your responsibility when you buy the house.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

This is super interesting, because the land registry in Barcelona reflects something like 25% of market value today for cadastral value, and was even less before their recent adjustment (+50% in my case) a couple years ago.

[biolurker1]

Explain more?

[mooreds]

Can you buy someplace in Spain where the market isn't awful and hold there?

Or maybe the answer is to be a house renter your entire life and just save in other ways?

[Arkhaine_kupo]

Spain has a big issue which OP didn't mention. We built more houses than were needed between 2000-2008. Which sadly means a ton of the emoty homes are owned by Banks, so if they devalue the houses their stock price plummets. So they are incentivized to keep the prices artificially high.

[iagovar]

That isn't the case anymore. Most of the stock has already been sold, and what isn't sold has been transferred to Sareb, except a few ones that may produce some profit in the future.

[H8crilA]

Sometimes I wish that people could short sell homes ...

[pjlegato]

There are shortable futures contracts tied to US housing price indexes[1], but they're highly illiquid (rarely trade, and have wide bid/ask spreads). This is probably related to the difficulty of hedging, since as another poster points out housing is not fungible, and to the very high transaction costs involved in buying or selling the underlying.

[1] https://www.homepricefutures.com/

[H8crilA]

Yeah I know about those. Robert Shiller was behind this project, in his mind many mortgages should be bundled with a put option on such an index. I agree. Needles to say his idea didn't catch on.

Here I was thinking about shorting specific homes, those for which one of the parent comments implied that their value is substantially lower than the current asking prices. It's a very futuristic idea, though not entirely impossible. If you're long on something then lending that thing out to a short seller is profitable because he has to pay you the lending fees (usually up to a few % per year).

[pjlegato]

Interesting idea! Who would take the other (long) side of the trade? Why would someone who thinks housing prices are going up not just buy a house outright?

[H8crilA]

The long party is whoever currently owns the property that is being sold short. It would be essentially a leverage tool for property owners. As a property owner you already enjoy a cash flow stream in the form of rent (could be implicit if you live in the property), you'd get a second stream from the short seller.

The only fuzzy part in this scheme is when does the short seller finally get paid. It would probably require some kind of a foreclosure on the property (otherwise the property owner would have to lock up a significant amount of some other collateral), putting a cap on the short sale profits.

This is kind of how reverse mortgages work. There the bank (or some other financial company) plays the role of the short seller, while the retiree is the long. The short side payout happens at death.

[HPsquared]

Perhaps to take advantage of overly-pessimistic short sellers? :P

Not that I'm taking a position either way, I actually suspect (real) prices will probably fall if interest rates ever normalise.

[amelius]

Some people say that all kinds of real estate speculation should be put to an end ...

[wizzwizz4]

They're not fungible, so that wouldn't even make sense. What do you mean?

[TomGullen]

> Yeah they know that their property is falling apart but they won't buy under $value because they bought it at that price or similar reasonings.

That sounds like part of a chain of dominos to me. I'd imagine given time this would be less common.

[iagovar]

Given enough time some properties would be basically worth less than 0€

[HPsquared]

People with big mortgages can't easily sell, as they need to raise enough funds to pay it off.

[jcmontx]

How's the credit/mortgage situation in Spain? Isn't it feasible to buy a small property taking a loan at a reasonable rate?

[ArkVark]

This is the problem with a lack of land and property taxation. Elderly people will hold onto assets forever, until death essentially, whilst the building and society collapses around them. Meanwhile they demand a huge amount of welfare and healthcare services without paying into the system.

At least the land tax system in the USA encourages downsizing and efficient allocation of this resource.

[stevoo]

And what would you'r solution be? Take from them the houses they worked their whole lives to acquire and put them in elderly homes? They have paid their share to society by providing the taxes for 65+ years that they have worked and brought us where we are today. Those homes are not vanished from the market. They will be inherited by their children and so on. Land taxation is by my opinion inherently bad for that specific reason ( if they have only one piece of land )

The problem is that we are pilling into cities where land is minimal and thus the market works in supply and demand.

Hopefully as years pass, where remote work is more and more accessible you can be owning your own 1 euro or whatever home in any area and not worry about limited land.

[RHSeeger]

I really don't understand this argument. Land taxes are supposed to pay for the various services in the area (schools, roads, etc). You don't pay your fair share and be done, you pay every year because those services cost money every year. If, at some point, you can no longer afford those costs (excluding those situations where social welfare safety nets are supposed to help), you move somewhere else. You don't get to keep taking advantage those services without paying for them just because you've been there for a long time.

[corty]

In Germany thats what income tax is for. The municipality receives the money and funds local infrastructure from it. I think the rest of Europe is at least similar in this regard.

One can argue about which system is better, but taxing elderly people out of their homes would never fly politically over here.

[dragandj]

... and that's why we have families who are on the verge of welfare not selling their expensive (additional) properties, waiting them to appreciate even more in value, dreaming of selling them somewhere in future and making their children set for life, while working class people have to pay 50% of their already heavily taxed wages for rent...

[luckylion]

> In Germany thats what income tax is for.

No. The main funding for local communities are property tax ("Grundsteuer") and business tax ("Gewerbesteuer"), income tax share only accounts for about a third. The height of both are also set on the local level the community has a very direct way to change the available money.

[geff82]

And Grundsteuer is quite cheap compared to property taxes in North America.

[ipnon]

This is known as the Poor Widow fallacy.

edit: https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html

edit: A solution to this problem is to allow seniors to defer payment of the land value tax until the next purchase of the land, at which point the next buyer will receive the deferred tax burden.

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Copying your URL here and adding the scheme so it renders as a link:

https://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html

[rbecker]

Land tax also does not allow you to simply exist - you have to make a profit to pay the tax. You can't just grow your own food and ignore the economy. It also comes with perverse incentives, like opposing anything that might raise property values unless you want to sell.

Perhaps it's a uniquely American view, having no connection to the land you live on, looking at it as just an economic resource to be 'allocated'.

[dragandj]

Even in pre-civilised societies you couldn't simply exist. You didn't pay taxes, yet you also had to work hard to protect the land from intruders, or, heck, even had to bust your ass off to provide regular access to basic things such as water and food.

[mensetmanusman]

This. Nothing ever simply exists (entropy!).

Money in the bank changes in value. Investments in companies that go bang or bust. Ignoring a fruit plant that dies...

Change is the only constant in life.

[novok]

> like opposing anything that might raise property values unless you want to sell

Are you in America? Raising your property values is like a religion here.

[jacobush]

Where the land tax works. Which is not most places in the USA.

[theandrewbailey]

Most of the USA doesn't have a land tax. Instead, there is a property tax, which is determined by what's sitting on the land.

[kube-system]

This not true. US property taxes nearly all tax both the land and any improvements (i.e. permanent structures) that sit on it.

My property in the US is taxed by: ( [assessed value of the land] + [assessed value of the building(s)] ) * [tax rate] = [total tax]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Property_tax_in_the_United_Sta...