PARIS – Kevin McGillicuddy definitely has his work cut out for him.

Over the next 14 months, with a team of nine trained data collectors, the full time Paris assessor will come up with new assessments for all 2,700 properties in town.

“Kevin is doing a wonderful job training data collectors and pulling the revaluation program together,” said Town Manager Steve McAllister told selectmen recently.

The revaluation is needed because for several years Paris has been around 70 percent of market value. The state requires towns to keep their properties assessed at 100 percent of market value.

Data collectors have measured and inspected about 200 properties to date, including 40 to 50 commercial properties.

“Some of the buildings are coming in very low,” McGillicuddy said. Preliminary figures indicate the town is at 71.5 percent of market value.

“That’s not a good number,” he said. With a lower assessment, residents don’t get as much of the Homestead Exemption and Veterans’ Exemptions they are entitled to, he said.

“It’s a very difficult job to do a full town-wide revaluation because you’re not going to please everyone,” McGillicuddy said. The goal is to get as accurate a picture as possible of what everyone’s property is worth, and then do periodic updates to keep up with changing market values.

His first task has been to review around 120 properties that needed to be revisited because of renovations, additions or other changes. That work has been done, he said. Currently he’s doing data entry on all business personal property in town, and inputting it into the town’s new TRIO software program. He said he has no plans to tax residential personal property, especially after all the controversy that caused when Windham’s assessor decided to tax residential property, as assessors are allowed to do by law.

There were a few bugs to deal with with the town’s new TRIO system software, but everything is flowing smoothly now, he said. This is the first year they’ve had a computer system for handling assessments. Prior to that, the work was all done manually by Assistant Town Clerk Joan Bean and Mike Austin and Donna Hayes, who came in to do updates twice a year.

The asking pricing of homes may be coming down a bit because the market is saturated, but the actual market price, the price the house sells for, is set by the property owner, he said.

McGillicuddy has created around a dozen “neighborhoods” to do ratio studies based on the state’s three methods: the cost approach, the market approach and the sales or income approach.

“All can stand alone or be used to back up the other two,” he said. He likes the neighborhood method of arriving at assessments because proximity to a certain neighborhood can be used as one criteria in assessing value.

The data collectors are collecting information of the grade of construction and overall condition of the home, as well as its size. All those facts help determine value, he said.

The sales ratio comes in when he takes the assessed value and divides it by the sales value, he said.

He is certified by the Bureau of Revenue Services, and receives a salary of $39,000 since beginning work for the town July 26.

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