Spencer Fane's Michael Miller on the critical steps for finding tax relief.

This is a challenging time in the property tax world. Pandemic-era federal assistance programs have dried up, increasing communities' appetite for tax dollars to deal with crime, homelessness, transportation and other issues. Recognizing that inflation has put taxpayers under pressure, governments may offer tax relief to homeowners, their voters, but not to the commercial property owner.

In Colorado, a November ballot issue would reduce the valuation of a residential property by $40,000 and of a commercial property by $50,000. This will be little help to an owner of a $2 million commercial property.

Relief for the commercial property owner must instead come from a deep dive into the assessor's valuation, best performed by the property owner and an experienced property tax professional working as a team. What follows are key stages for preparing an appeal.

1. Understand and observe all filing deadlines.

Every state has a deadline for starting the appeal process. If a taxpayer misses that deadline, they lose the right to appeal. In some states, after paying their tax, a taxpayer might be allowed to file for an abatement sometime later.

It is important to provide the property tax professional with relevant information in sufficient time to analyze it before filing the appeal. This is a challenge in many cases, such as when the taxpayer receiving tax notices is out of state and their advisor is local. Contacting the advisor before tax notices go out can provide a head start, often enabling the advisor to find the property's taxable value before the notice arrives.

2. Critically analyze the assessment basis.

By itself, a substantial value increase does not qualify as a reason to appeal. Often, the assessor will justify the increase based on the general market strength shown in substantially rising prices. The taxpayer must ask, is this for the entire county, or for this specific type of property in this specific location?

A recent example illustrates how assessors' generalizations can overstate an individual property's value change. As our firm appealed a client's assessment in an expensive resort area, the local newspaper quoted the assessor stating that prices had increased 50% or even more. Available sales of comparable properties all occurred at least a year prior to the valuation period, while one was near the valuation period.

The assessor trended the earlier sales to the valuation period by making a 50% adjustment to each sales price. However, our team compared the most recent year-ago sale with the current sale of a comparable property in the same location, showing that the price per square foot only went up 14%. It was clear the 50% increase was a mass appraisal number covering the entire county, while prices in the subject property's submarket increased at a much slower pace. This deep dive yielded results in the appeal.

3. Analyze the assessor's comparable sales.

Most jurisdictions require assessors to value the fee simple estate, the real estate alone. Assessors have attempted to debate what this means, but what it clearly does not mean is a sale price based upon the income generated by a lease. Nor can the taxable value be based on the success of the business operated from the property.

Simply stated, fee simple value must be limited to the real estate, not the business. When applying this to an owner-occupied property, this means a fee-simple buyer would be purchasing a vacant property. Value is based on the price at which a willing buyer would buy, and a willing seller would sell, the property. And in the sale of an owner-occupied property, there is no lease.

Often in this situation, the assessor will nevertheless use the sale of a leased property as a comparable. It is not comparable, because the buyer is buying the income stream from the lease, not just the bricks and mortar. Moreover, the rent seldom reflects current market rent. Possibly the lease was signed when rents were higher than today, the lease escalated rents automatically, or the landlord agreed to build the property according to the tenant's specifications and increased the rent by the amortized cost. Every lease is unique. The sale of a leased property is simply not the same as the sale of a property without a lease.

While examining income properties within the assessor's comparable sales, be sure to analyze the income's source. Taxable values of income-producing properties are based on income derived from the real estate and not income derived from other sources.

A hotel buyer, for example, is buying not only the bricks and mortar, but also the flag or brand, and the hotel's reputation. These are intangibles included in the acquisition price. However, intangible value is not subject to a property tax.

Another example of this concept is seniors housing. Seniors housing has numerous profit centers beyond rent for the room. It may have a beauty shop, a physical therapy center, a recreation facility such as a bowling alley, special medical services and many other offerings. The resident pays rent, but also pays extra for the many services. For property tax purposes, the income used to determine value must be separated between business cashflow and income generated from the real estate.

Property tax in the current environment can indeed present a challenge, but it need not be overwhelming. The taxpayer must analyze the assessor's value in depth to find factors that would result in a successful appeal. It may start with sticker shock over the assessor's notice, but an experienced tax professional's analysis can level the playing field between the assessor aggressively pursuing increased funding and the property tax owner looking for tax relief.

Careful preparation is the key to contesting these unfair property taxes.

It may be paradoxical that big-box retail has lost property value in real estate markets where commercial property values in general are climbing, but that is the message many owners must convey to achieve a lower property tax bill.

For decades, big-box properties generated significant tax revenue for schools and local governments, but that story is changing. Annual valuation gains of 2 percent to 10 percent annual increases may have become a simple rule of thumb at one time for assessed values, but are no longer expected or acceptable to most big-box owners. Instead, there is now a major struggle between the big-box owners and the local property tax assessor.

Many companies have changed their real estate and marketing strategy to adapt to declining big-box property values. Toys R Us, Kmart, Sears and other stores have either closed stores or no longer exist. Others, including Walmart and Target, have adapted to suit customers who are no longer happy shopping in a mega store, or having to walk to a distant corner of a mega store to pick up a toothbrush, a bottle of milk or a pair of shoes.

Many retailers have achieved positive results by reducing store sizes. Target moved away from the superstore format to stores of 25,000-45,000 square feet, emphasizing the "grab and go" concept rather than the full grocery store.

Some experiments have not worked so well. Walmart opened a number of smaller, "neighborhood" Walmarts, only to close many a few years later. Mega stores still exist, but while commercial real estate values in general may be soaring, the value of these mega stores generally is not.

Yet, the local assessors do not see it that way, applying either a simple, across-the-board increase based on the general market, or using the standard cost, income capitalization and market/sales approaches to perpetuate valuation increases that ignore changing retail dynamics.

Points of contention

The cost approach often results in an inflated and unrealistic value that no one would pay in an open-market transaction. The cost approach should only be used on a relatively new building with little depreciation or obsolescence to take into account. The original cost may also include single-purpose features which have little or no value to a second-generation user.

Finally, if the building is to be repurposed, there is enormous added cost to convert a mega store to multi-tenant occupancy or to a different use with a shallower usable depth; it may not be economically feasible.

The income approach is often unavailable since these stores are most often owner-occupied, and this approach should only be applied for a rental property. An owner-occupied property should never be required to produce income and expenses in the context of a valuation of the property for property tax purposes. Such information values the business that is being operated from the property, and not the bricks, mortar and land.

This leaves the third option, the market or sales approach, as the primary appraisal method. Here starts the war.

First, many assessors see a Walmart, Kohl's, Target or a Lowe's store differently than they do a local mom-and-pop store operated from a similar property. Yet this is wrong, because it violates basic principles of property tax valuations.

A taxing entity cannot collect property taxes on the value to the name as an ongoing business, but only on the bricks, mortar and land. Buildings with comparable size, location, age, quality and other real estate characteristics should have the same value, regardless of whether there is a national name on the building.

Second, most big boxes are owner-occupied. If sold, there would be no lease to transfer to the buyer; the building would be vacant and available to the buyer for its own use or subsequent leasing to a user-tenant. The way to apply this sales approach in such cases is to compare the big box to comparable sales of non-leased property that are, or soon will be, vacant and available.

Such sales in the relevant period are often hard to find. Many of these properties linger on the market for years before they are sold or repurposed. As a result of such few sales for comparison, the assessor will gravitate to using sales of leased properties.

A leased property is a totally different animal from an owner-occupied, big box store. The sale is based on the lease itself – the remaining term on the lease, the net income generated, the tenant's credit and the like. Often, the lease predates the sale by years and does not reflect current market rent. Sometimes the property was a build-to-suit project with rent based on the cost resulting from the user's specific requirements, which resulted in an initial inflated cost to build.

Case in point

This played out in one of my recent cases. The assessor valued a big box at $105 per square foot, based on recent sales of leased properties, with the rent in most of them being established 10-20 years earlier. Some were build-to-suit leases.

There was, however, a recent sale at $75 per square foot of a vacant big box store in a neighboring county. The Colorado Board rejected the assessor's valuation, finding that a vacant store represented the true market value, and reduced the taxable value to $10 million from the assessor's $15 million. This $5 million reduction resulted from digging into the assessor's analysis, pointing out the flaw in the cost and income approaches, and eliminating sales of leased properties.

The battle will soon start anew, and it is never too early to start accumulating the necessary data that will determine the victor.