Workers donning bright yellow vests, grasping clipboards, spreading tape measures and snapping photographs will visit properties in Ocean Shores and Montesano over the next six months.

Property owners and residents should be able to identify visitors — based on garb and props — as county assessors dispatched to pinpoint updated property values, according to Dan Lindgren, Grays Harbor County Assessor.

But if homeowners are unsure about a visitor, just ask them for county identification, Lindgren said, or simply call the Assessor’s Office to verify the worker’s presence.

“The Assessor’s Office staff will always be able to produce county identification,” Lindgren wrote in an Oct. 18 press release.

Lindgren said appraisers will arrive in a car flanked with the Grays Harbor County logo, and shouldn’t stay long.

“The Assessor’s office staff does the best that they can to minimize the time spent on each property and respects the privacy of every property owner while still doing the work necessary to inspect each property properly to produce accurate values for property taxing purposes,” Lindgren said.

The assessors will be gathering data for the county Assessor’s Office to establish a fair market value for those properties.

According to the county assessor’s website, “Washington state law requires all property to be assessed at 100% of market value according to its highest and best use, and all values are required to be fair, uniform and equitable.”

The assessor’s office doesn’t bill or collect taxes, nor does it set property tax rates — that’s left up to the cost of public services and voter approved levies, such as for school districts and fire departments.

And the assessor doesn’t create market value — the amount buyers are willing to cough up under ordinary circumstances. Instead, the assessor’s office determines how much properties are worth based on current markets. When making assessments about market value, assessors are required to use multiple sales of similar properties.

Once tax districts adopt their budgets for the following year, the assessor’s office calculates the tax rates necessary to meet budget requirements set by those districts.

The assessor’s office maintains data from over 64,000 real properties and 2,700 business personal properties across Grays Harbor County.