Real Estate Agents Mobilize to Shield Homeowners on Tax Plan<br />The Senate version of the tax bill would eliminate the deduction for local property taxes (the House bill caps it at $10,000),<br />and both the House and Senate bills would effectively make the mortgage-interest deduction less valuable to many homeowners.<br />If you’re in West Texas or Nebraska, no big deal, and you may even benefit.”<br />In New York and New Jersey, which have expensive homes<br />and high property taxes, home values could fall as much as 14 percent by 2019 under the Senate plan, according to the Moody’s analysis.<br />But now that those tax breaks are baked into the system, homeowners have come to count on them and in some cases could end up “underwater” —<br />that is, their home would be worth less than their mortgage — if their deductions were abruptly ripped away.<br />Both bills would roughly double the standard deduction, which would lead fewer households to itemize their deductions; households<br />that take the standard deduction don’t directly benefit from the mortgage-interest deduction, which reduces the value of owning a home.<br />According to an analysis of the plans by Moody’s Analytics, the nation’s most expensive real estate<br />markets could see significant declines in home values under both versions of the tax plan.<br />By Conor Dougherty and Ben Casselman<br />For decades, the real estate industry has benefited from generous tax deductions<br />that raise home values by making it cheaper for people to own property and shoulder their local taxes.
