(Bannock County Assessor’s Newsletter, November 9, 2023)
This month, we’re focusing on commercial and income-producing properties for our appraisal corner.
We find that the market continues to outpace our expectations regarding income-producing properties in our local market for 2023, including apartments, office space, and general commercial space. Smaller commercial/retail spaces continue to fill up, with a fair number of new-builds entering the market fully occupied.
All indicators indicate the need for a robust increase of assessed values for many commercial properties in 2024. While the Assessor’s Office collects sales and income information for some of the commercial sales in Bannock County, we continue to look for ways to increase the amount of data we can collect each year. More data will help us ensure that commercial properties are more equitably assessed, which will help balance the tax burden more evenly amongst residential and commercial property owners.
Other counties in Idaho have had greater success in gathering sales and income data directly from property owners and brokers through confidentiality. Confidentiality is important when dealing with all properties, but especially for commercial properties, in order to protect business owners’ income information. Property owners have been more willing to share sales information, along with income and expense data, when counties have taken additional measures to ensure the confidentiality of the data. Only a few key members of the Assessor’s Office would have access to this data, and a heavily redacted version of the data would be used in a larger overall analysis each year. This is a developing process, and we want to include property owners, business owners, agents, and brokers as partners in this endeavor.
At the end of the day, the sales and income information we have collected indicates that many commercial properties will likely experience increased assessments for 2024 to keep up with the market. Our goal is to build stronger partnerships with our local property/business owners and agents/brokers so that we may work to ensure that we are most accurately representing the local market.
