The State Legislature is likely to pass a bill pushed by Pinellas County Property Appraiser Mike Twitty to require real estate sites like Zillow and Redfin to provide more accurate assessments of future property tax costs for new homebuyers.
The bill, SB-856, passed the Senate unanimously last month. While the House has not yet taken it up as session rolls into its final week, the bill’s language is likely to be included in the Legislature’s must-pass tax package, ensuring its enshrinement into law. Homebuying websites will be required to comply with it by February 1, 2027.
Twitty, the Pinellas Property Appraiser since 2016, has been pushing legislation on the subject in every session since 2023. “Watching what was happening in my own office and hearing my fellow property appraisers around the state, we could clearly see that it was our number one constituent complaint and the one that caused the most heartburn and financial strain on people,” he said.
Florida’s Save Our Homes cap restricts the amount a home’s taxable value can increase in a given year, in addition to a $50,000 homestead exemption. This exemption is doubled for all ‘ad valorem’ (value-based) taxes except for schools. As a result, during real estate booms, the assessed value of a property may be less than half of its actual market value.
Homebuying sites such as Zillow have based property tax estimates on the average tax rate in a particular county, which “includes homesteaders from 30 years ago,” noted Twitty. The result is that when a buyer purchases the property, that assessment resets to the market rate and the new owner is hit with a large bill.
“People get so excited about buying a new home. They tend to forget about those really important details,” said Senator Nick DiCeglie (R-Indian Rocks Beach) in testimony to the Senate Committee on Finance and Tax.
While disclosure forms in the homebuying process communicate this increase, and the Property Appraiser’s site features its own tax calculator, Twitty acknowledges that many buyers are blindsided.
“We spend a ton of time educating on that front, but the issue is we’re not the first touch with that buyer. So there’s no way for us to know who’s currently shopping, to be able to get out in front of them,” he explained. “It doesn’t really become grim reality until they get that escrow letter when they cross their first Jan.1. All of a sudden, ‘Oh, you’re five grand short.
“So that’s when we see the tears in our office. And it just doesn’t need to happen nearly as often as it does.”
To remedy this, SB-856 requires real estate sites to utilize tax calculation methods prescribed by the bill, in particular an aggregate average millage rate for each county from the state Department of Revenue. The bill explicitly forbids basing the calculation on the home’s current tax bill. This will result in far more accurate estimates of the actual tax burden of a new home to a family.
According to Twitty, Zillow and Trulia have already implemented the bill’s recommendations.
DiCeglie partnered with Rep. Adam Anderson (R–Palm Harbor), who had been the bill’s sponsor in every session since 2023. According to Twitty, they built support and knowledge over time amongst legislators during the brief time in each session when bills could be heard. That included ensuring any legislative fix was technically feasible.
“We’ve adjusted the language each year to try and accommodate for those things, but not give away what the bill is ultimately trying to accomplish, which is to provide a better transparency and a more reasonable expectation of what you might be facing as a new buyer.
“It just took four sessions to get to where we are now.”
The non-partisan Florida Tax Watch “supports this overdue change because Save Our Homes often make a property’s tax current tax bill much lower than it will be when the home is sold and reassessed without having accrued any SOH benefit … The newly filed House tax package (HB 7031) also contains this good provision.”
Local realtors also reacted positively. “With the lion’s share of buyers getting their information from Zillow, we have to hold Zillow accountable to deliver accuracy to the public and the consumer,” said Beth Silverman, a St. Petersburg-based realtor with eXp Realty.
Said DiCeglie succinctly: “This is a consumer-friendly bill.”