RPTA defines assessment and taxation lots, often referred to as A&T lots or simply tax lots. These lots are strictly for real estate taxation purposes.
RPTA normally defines tax lots under two circumstances:
1) when property owners ask for their real property tax bills to be consolidated, after they have bought several contiguous record lots; this is called a combine;
2) when part of a record lot is sold, but no new record lot is yet defined; this is called a split request.
There are roughly 32,000 tax lots. Tax lots are not determined by survey, and are therefore not official lots in the same way record lots are. These lots are normally numbered between 800 and 1999 within a square to differentiate them from record lots on the property tax maps. When a tax lot is established by RPTA, an A&T Plat is generated by RPTA and forwarded to the surveyor’s office. These A&T Plats are not reviewed but simply filed by the Surveyor; they do not comply with the standards required of subdivision plats, and are not recorded.
Tax Lots are not normally acceptable when applying for building permits and must be converted to Record Lots through the normal subdivision process involving the D.C. Surveyor’s Office before permits will be issued. The only exception is if the lot does not face a public street.
Furthermore, at the time of their creation and platting, there is no review made of tax lots for compliance with D.C. Zoning, Subdivisions or any other ordinances. These lots are simply pieces of property, owned by somebody, described in deeds, for which tax bills are sent and real estate taxes are collected by the city. Some Record Lots also function in this capacity.
Geographically, tax lots typically overlay layers such as record lots or sometimes reservations. There are known instances where tax lots do not overlay these types of layers. Up until approximately 1972, A&T lots were only created by the Tax Assessor out of lands that had been previously Record Lots at some point in their history. For a short period of time in the early to mid 1970’s, a decision was made to start eliminating fractional parcels (see definition below) and make them all into A&T lots. The intent was to do away with Parcels altogether and have all properties in the city be either tax lots or record lots. By doing this, they converted unsubdivided parcels into A&T lots where no underlying record lot exists. There is often little or no historical source information about there types of transactions therefore vectorizing them often required vast amounts of research.
Tax Lot layers in VPM are (point, line, poly) - TaxLotsPT, TaxLotsLN, TaxLotsPLY, Tax_Lots_History_LN, Tax_Lots_History_PLY
There are also two special types of tax lots: condo tax lots and air right tax lots.
Condo Lots
Condo tax lots are individual lots for each condominium. The lot numbers normally range from 2000-6999. These condo lots are not geographically defined other than being associated with a record lot or tax lot that has one or more condo buildings within it. A condo regime number is assigned to each Condo application or Article of Confederation regardless of how many buildings there are at any one site. The Regime number starts with a 1, 2, or 3 depending upon where the condo is located and where they fall in the tri-annual assessment process of RPTA. All numbers after the first are consecutive. RPTA maintains the master list of Regime numbers, then establishes individual accounts for each condominium unit and assigns a tax lot number to that account. There are roughly 55,000 condo tax lots situated over 1000+ record lots.
Lots (Record/Tax or Ownerply) with Condo dwellings can be queried city-wide where the value in the “UNDERLIES_CONDO” field is equal to 1. The following fields; “CONDO_BK” AND “CONDO_PG” will allow users to research (if necessary) the original source material recorded in the Office of the Surveyor. The CondoRelate.dbf table stored on both DC Central SDE & VPM SDE production databases will help to quantify the number of Condos residing on a lot(s). Additional layers to help visualize the various relationships are Real Property & Tax Assessment’s (RPTA) Ownerpt layer where the Lot is greater than or equal to 2000 but less than or equal to 6999 & District of Columbia Consumer & Regulatory’s (DCRA) Addresspts for Lots with multiple structures and addresses.
Air Rights Lots
Air right lots are established by RPTA to reflect a party’s right to construct an improvement above an existing area of land that is not owned by the constructor. These tax lot numbers start at 7000. There are approximately 100-200 of these air right tax lots. Air rights are taxed in DC.
Air Rights Lots layers in VPM are (point, line, poly) - AirRightsLotsPT, AirRightsLotsLN, AirRightsLotsPLY, Air_Rights_Lots_History_LN, Air_Rights_Lots_History_PLY