CANNON BEACH — In its glory days, the vintage house at 532 North Laurel St. was probably a stunner.

Built in 1920, the single-family dwelling, which sits on 0.57 acres, has a clear view of Haystack Rock and beachgoers treading along the shoreline.

The interior walls are made of old-growth timber that isn’t used in construction anymore. There is no built-in heating system, so a furnace in the living room releases heat to the second floor through a vent in the ceiling. The flue is made of wood, which would be almost unthinkable today.

When it was a new oceanfront cottage, county tax appraisers might have given it a “4,” where “1” means barely habitable and “8” means unlimited wealth, said Catherine Harper, senior appraiser at the Clatsop County Assessment and Taxation Department.

Now, however, it is classified as a “3” in county tax records, which means it meets the minimum building code for its age. It hasn’t been appraised since the mid-1990s.

The shake siding is rotted in places. The roof sags slightly. The foundation is cracked. And the add-on bathroom with its exterior plumbing pipes likely came into being before the building code discouraged such modifications.

Nevertheless, the whole ocean-view property — the structures, the on-site developments and the land beneath them — was recently listed for sale for $899,000 and sold in July for $895,000.

Yet, as of the 2013-14, the property’s real market value — as written in the county assessor’s books — stood at $960,434, down from $1,088,799 the previous year.

“This really isn’t a bad little house,” Harper said during the appraisal, between measuring the dimensions and photographing the exterior. “There’s some quality here. It’s just old. It needs some work.”

The cottage is one of many properties in Cannon Beach the Clatsop County Assessment and Taxation department has targeted for a physical door-to-door reappraisal.

Last year, Arch Cape was the department’s focus. This year, it’s Cannon Beach, which may take up to two years to finish reappraising, said Michael Grant, the assessment and taxation director for Clatsop County.

With some discounts applied, the property taxes charged on the cottage — based on its assessed valuation — totaled $6,656.29 last year. Depending on the department’s final assessment, that amount could change.

Every July 15, more than 60 Clatsop County taxing districts submit a budget to the assessment and taxation office.

“They’re only submitting to us the budget they would need,” said Suzanne Johnson, chief deputy assessor and tax collector. She added that the districts’ budgets include other sources of revenue that they rely on.

The taxation department applies the total amount of requests to the amount of assessed value within a taxing district. Then the property tax rate is calculated per $1,000 of assessed valuation and applied to individual properties within the district.

This year’s billing statements will be mailed out to Clatsop County residents before Oct. 25 and are due Nov. 17.

Property taxes pay for an array of public services. Some are countywide, like the Port of Astoria; others are specific to taxing districts, like the Cannon Beach Rural Fire Protection District.

Asked how he would succinctly summarize Oregon’s property tax system, Grant replied, “mass confusion.”

The real market value of a property is an estimate of the price that houses of similar size, type and quality will sell for on the market. This number goes up and down with market fluctuations.

And by Oregon statute, it’s only one value that state assessment offices look at when determining what property tax amounts should be.

Another value is the “maximum assessed value,” which is where the real market value stood in 1995 (or when the house was built after 1995) minus 10 percent, unless significant changes have been made to the property since then.

The assessed value is whichever number — the real market value or the maximum assessed value — is lower in any given tax year. And this is the number — the assessed value — that property owners pay their property taxes on.

When the maximum assessed value becomes the assessed value, it chugs upward by 3 percent a year. Because there’s a cap on how high it can increase, the county’s reliance on the maximum assessed value to be the assessed value in most cases helps keep property taxes pretty stable over time.

But when real market value plummets — like it did when the housing market crashed in 2008 — sometimes the real market value becomes the lower number, and, therefore, the assessed value.

This means that property taxes are suddenly subject to market forces, but only up to a point: As soon as the real market value exceeds the maximum assessed value once again, the latter becomes the assessed value, and stability in property taxes is achieved again.

“We’ve got the most complicated property tax system, I believe, in the United States,” Grant said, noting that any attempt to explain it to a non-tax collector often poses quite a challenge. “Someday, somebody’s going to rewrite our tax code.”

The property taxes applied to the North Laurel Street cottage help pay for the county’s operations, bond levies, the Port of Astoria, Clatsop Community College, the Sunset Empire Transportation District, the fire department, the city of Cannon Beach and other taxing districts.

But to the homeowner paying those property taxes, a house is usually worth more than either its real market value or its assessed value, Harper admitted. There’s the emotional component, too.

“I’m looking at this house and seeing there’s a lot of problems,” she said. “But it’s probably in good shape for a 100-year-old house.”

‘We’ve got the most complicated property tax system, I believe, in the United States.’

— Michael Grant

Clatsop County assessment and taxation director