Northeast

Reducing property tax assessments can be challenging under the best of circumstances, and distinctions between state tax systems make minimizing that burden across an office or industrial portfolio especially daunting. But a recent Delaware Supreme Court decision provides taxpayers with a new, yet surprisingly familiar, opportunity to ease the tax burden on properties in The First State. Delaware’s Tax Assessment System Shows its Age Under Delaware law, property must be valued at its “true value in money,” a term interpreted to mean the property’s “present actual market value.” However, in order to implement the Delaware Constitution’s mandate of tax uniformity, the state applies a base-year method of assessing property. That means that all property in a jurisdiction is assessed in terms of its value as of a certain date, and that value remains on the books indefinitely until the jurisdiction performs a general reassessment. For Delaware’s northernmost county, New Castle County, the last reassessment occurred in 1983, so all property therein is valued as of July 1, 1983. A major challenge to contesting assessments in Delaware is that a taxpayer must determine the property’s 1983 market value. Determining what a property is worth today is not always easy, but proving …