The TurboTax program uses information from your latest property tax bill for the sole and only purpose of determining what percentage of what you originally paid for the property, was paid for the land. That's it. Nothing else.
Information on your property tax bill may be presented in many different ways. It just depends on how your property tax office does things. For example, mine shows like this:
Total Value: $250,000
Land: $75,000
With that, I can do the simple math and see that my improvement value is $175,000
In other areas, the property tax bill may show like this:
Structure: $175,000
Land: 75,000
Again, with some simple addition, I can see my total tax value is $250,000. But in both examples above, only 30% of the value is assigned to the land. The other 70% is assigned to the structure and other items that are on that land.
Understand that the values shown on the tax bill are not anywhere close to what you actually paid for the property. On average the tax value will be 30% less (give or take) than it's actual market value (called Fair Market Value) if you were to actually sell it. The program just uses your input from that tax bill for the sole purpose of determining what percentage of what you originally paid for the property, gets allocated to the cost of the land. That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less.
