As the South Florida housing boom was running out of steam, Stephen Czuchta was astonished to learn that his Sunny Isles Beach condo had jumped 20 percent in value in a year.

Or so said the tax man.

In his 2008 property-tax notice, Czuchta's unit in the Oceanview was valued at $447,310 -- up from $372,760 -- guaranteeing a big property-tax increase on the two-bedroom investment unit.

When the next round of proposed property-tax notices go out in late August, many South Florida homeowners may find themselves in the same boat -- baffled by valuations that defy logic.

With South Florida's real-estate market in upheaval, property appraisers and the boards that review their decisions are struggling to put a fair and accurate price tag on properties. Muddying the waters: an array of foreclosures and short sales (distressed properties sold for less than the amount owed to lenders) and a significant dose of mortgage fraud.

All of them can distort reality when determining the true value of a property -- and surrounding properties.

`A LOT OF CONFUSION'

''There is a lot of confusion over foreclosures and short sales,'' said Britt J. Rosen, who runs Rosen Tax Appeal, representing property owners in hearings before the Value Adjustment Board, the agency that hears assessment appeals. ``And fraudulent sales are a real problem.''

Taxpayers like Czuchta -- whose unit, because it is an investment property, is not protected by the Save Our Homes cap on increases in taxable value -- could be big losers.

Here's why: Property valuations are based largely on the sales price of comparable units -- often in the same building, in the case of condos. But it has been common for the appraiser to disregard many distressed sales that result in an artificially low price being paid.

On the flip side, appraisers have been less able to detect mortgage fraud, in which property sells for an inflated price, then goes into foreclosure. Those sales can artificially increase the assessed value of comparable units nearby.

In Czuchta's building at 19390 Collins Ave., a former rental project converted to condos in 2005, there were multiple cases of what residents and the condo association suspect to be mortgage fraud.

''It's absolutely ludicrous,'' Czuchta said of those sales. ``Nobody in their right mind would have paid those prices for those units at the end of 2007.''

The condo association brought them to the attention of the FBI. But when some residents took their concerns to the property appraiser's office, ''they were flatly turned down,'' association President Ted Harrison said in an e-mail.

When Czuchta made the same argument to the Value Adjustment Board, the agency that hears assessment appeals, his bid for a reduction in his valuation was denied. Adding to the sting: Four of the sales of comparable units cited by the property appraiser's representative to justify the high assessment for Czuchta's unit were properties that had quickly gone into foreclosure after high-priced sales.

At Czuchta's board hearing, the property appraiser's representative insisted that a mortgage-fraud conviction was required to disqualify a comparable sale from assessment calculations.

The representative was wrong. Section 193.133 of the Florida statutes, enacted last year, permits a property appraiser to discard sales clearly tainted by mortgage fraud, even absent a court conviction.

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