<prompt> Human: I live in MA, which to my understanding is a buyer beware state when purchasing real estate. So realtorssellers are not required to tell me anything.Tomorrow Im looking at a house that Im wondering if I should be concerned about. The seller is asking for 269k, which appears to be very high for the area and property, but thats not what is concerning me. The town has assessed the home to be worth 207k. Now I know that this is an assessed value, and that assessed value ! market value, but looking at the assessed history of the property has me scratching my head. What has me concerned is the sudden drop a few years ago on this property.Year Land House Total:--:--:--:--201571.5135.5207201471.5129.4200.92013110.4152262.42012112.4152264.4Edit: numbers dont appear to completely line up, but thats what the website is sayingI looked at neighboring properties, and it does look like there was a was a drop in value around this time, but not this drastic, 1-5, not 20.Unfortunately the towns database isnt complete with information regarding house size and lot size, so I cannot be certain that something on the property wasnt removed.Is this something I should be very concerned with, or is it something that just happens? Either way I dont think Ill be putting in an offer near asking price on the house.  <response>: Im not sure how it is in MA, but in some states the property value the assessor uses is calculated using a formula, and therefore often has little relationship to the actual price of the property. And of course the assessed value of the property is related to property tax, so this can be a problem.Because of this, in a down market sometimes the assessors value can keep going up and up when the market value of the house has stayed stagnant or has fallen. When this happens the owner of the property can apply to the assessor to have the house revalued to a more accurate price. When the assessed price goes down the property taxes go down, so this is something home owners do quite often in slow markets. Id guess thats what happened here. 