As commercial property values fluctuate and tax assessments struggle to keep pace, organizations are facing mounting financial and compliance risks. This article explores real-world examples of misaligned assessments and outlines how tax.com’s integrated platform empowers tax teams to respond faster, manage risk proactively, and connect critical tax functions across property tax, transfer pricing, and unclaimed property.
There’s a quiet tension building in cities and counties across America, and for organizations managing commercial property portfolios, the stakes are rising quickly.
Consider the case of the Hyatt Regency in Greenwich, Connecticut, which found itself at the center of a valuation dispute that had been years in the making. The property had long been assessed at $79 million. But when it sold in 2022 for just $37.5 million, the discrepancy couldn’t be ignored. After years of overpayment, the hotel’s owners eventually reached a settlement with the town that resulted in a $685,000 tax credit. The final resolution spanned five assessment years, requiring legal intervention, negotiation, and no small amount of administrative complexity.
But the real question emerging from this example is simple: could this have been avoided?
In another part of the country, Cook County, Illinois, the home to Chicago, is grappling with its own assessment challenges. A recent report from the County Treasurer revealed commercial property owners were appealing their tax assessments more than twice as often as residential owners – and they were winning. In fact, the County’s Board of Review cut over $17 billion in commercial property value through appeals last year alone, dramatically altering what was originally projected to be a $22 billion revenue uptick into something far more modest.
Stories such as these aren’t isolated but represent a systemic challenge: commercial assessments in many jurisdictions are lagging what’s really going on at ground level, whether due to administrative backlogs, outdated valuation models, or market volatility.
That volatility is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Boston, where the decline of the commercial office market has been swift and sharp. Since 2019, some buildings have lost more than half their value, but assessments still haven’t caught up. This has resulted in residential homeowners shouldering an increasing share of the tax burden, while business owners and investors question whether their tax bills reflect current market conditions at all.
Meanwhile, on the West Coast, San Francisco’s Assessor-Recorder’s Office is facing a wave of criticism following months of reassessment delays. After inheriting two properties from her mother, Gloria Robles Wallace expected a smooth transition. Instead, she was blindsided by an estimated $160,000 tax liability triggered by Prop 19, a change in California law that removing inherited property tax protections for non-primary residences. Wallace’s experience isn’t unique, as thousands of properties are caught in limbo as overwhelmed tax offices struggle to process ownership changes and reassessments in a timely fashion.
And this isn’t just a coastal issue. Across mid-sized cities in Texas, Florida, and North Carolina, reassessment cycles are increasingly out of sync with post-pandemic market shifts. In some cases, municipalities are using outdated cap rate assumptions from 2018 or 2019 to value 2024 portfolios, leaving commercial property owners either scrambling to appeal inflated values or unsure how to accrue for what’s coming next.
The Bigger Picture: These Aren’t Just Edge Cases
While these examples feel local and isolated, they increasingly speak to a widening national trend: assessments are simply failing to keep pace with real-time changes in the commercial property market. Sometimes, that gap works in a taxpayer’s favor. But more often, it results in overpayments, missed appeal windows, and unanticipated accruals, all of which become red flags during audits or budget planning.
What’s more, the problem doesn’t always present itself through a dramatic reassessment or newsworthy appeal. Often, it’s a matter of cumulative risk, which can best be described as small mismatches between assessed and actual values that accumulate across dozens (or hundreds) of parcels. Each one represents a missed opportunity to challenge, reduce, or reallocate. But when left unchecked, they slowly erode the bottom line.
Worse still, these discrepancies rarely exist in a vacuum. Many properties that are over assessed are also leased between legal entities as part of broader transfer pricing structures. Or they carry historical credits, overpayments, or vendor liabilities that quietly migrate into the unclaimed property category. When data lives in silos, tax events stack up invisibly, until someone notices, and by then, the cost of resolution is steep.
It’s a challenge not just of oversight, but of orchestration, and orchestration is where tax.com excels.
How tax.com Unifies a Fragmented Landscape
This is where the full tax.com ecosystem begins to show its strength. Instead of relying on one-off tools or spreadsheets owned by individual teams, tax.com enables an integrated approach where property tax, unclaimed property, transfer pricing, and accruals all communicate within a single environment.
With tax.com:
- A property’s assessed value isn’t just stored, but it’s compared against market trends, flagged when thresholds are exceeded, and contextualized alongside financial metrics.
- When that same property is involved in intercompany leasebacks, the transfer pricing system recognizes it as a shared asset and pulls in valuation data for reporting and documentation.
- If payments are made in error or credits remain dormant, unclaimed property tools trigger alerts long before an auditor arrives.
- And through embedded logic tracking jurisdiction-specific rules, your team is notified about reassessment triggers, like ownership changes or development activity, before they become liabilities.
The outcome isn’t just faster response, but proactive decision-making rooted in connected intelligence.
Rethinking the Risk, Rethinking the Model
The old way of working, where property tax, compliance, and intercompany pricing live in separate systems (or worse, in inboxes), no longer works in an environment where market volatility, regulatory scrutiny, and financial complexity are on the rise.
With tax.com, the goal isn’t just compliance. It’s clarity.
Clarity that allows you to see risk before it appears, act decisively across jurisdictions, and link real estate, tax, and finance workflows into a single operational rhythm.
So the next time a property’s market value plummets, or a tax notice shows up unexpectedly, or a compliance team asks for documentation across three business units, you’ll already be ready.
A Smarter Way Forward
The news cycle may continue to highlight the inequities and delays in how commercial property is assessed, but organizations don’t need to wait for the next lawsuit, appeal, or audit to take action. With tax.com, the future of tax management isn’t about reacting to surprises. It’s about gaining clarity before problems surface. It’s about making informed decisions, in real time, across jurisdictions, business units, and tax disciplines.
It’s about visibility. And that starts with connection. Let’s stop chasing problems after the fact. Let’s start solving them before they start. Let’s rethink the way we work.