If you have ever picked up a real estate magazine or clicked through the HGTV television channel, you’ve surely participated in our culture’s fascination with extravagant homes. Whether this is a genuine curiosity, lust over wealth or some other trait that we have as humans, something has us spellbound by luxurious living.

And newspapers like to get in on this game, too. At the end of last month, South Florida Sun Sentinel published a story titled “By the numbers: The priciest tax bills for South Florida’s multimillion-dollar mansions” which looked at some of South Florida’s most expensive homes and what each is paying in property taxes. Several of these homeowners pay over $1 million in taxes each year. Surely these properties are “golden geese” for their cities… right? At Geoaccounting firm Urban3, we read the story and passed it around the office, and decided to #DoTheMath to see how these homes really compare on a pound-per-pound basis—tax value per acre—to others in the same communities.

South Florida Multi-Million Dollar Mansions

Author Lisa J. Huriash cited the seven homes in Figure 1 as paying some of the highest property taxes last year. The numbers range from over $300 thousand to more than $1.5 million.