Property assessments in NYC generally went down for commercial properties. Is it safe to adopt the reduced property taxes when trying to calculate for stabilized value?
Due to the impacts of Covid-19 on property values/cash flows, assessed values for commercial properties in NYC went significantly down more or less across the board. I will often come across a property that wasn't really even negatively impacted by Covid-19, like an industrial property in Brooklyn, and the assessed value may have gone down significantly.
I am wondering how people are handling this in their underwriting assumptions. Typically, you would just take the current taxes, make sure they are in-line with comparable properties, and then grow them out by 3% per year. But perhaps that would not be prudent now, especially for properties where the assessment reduction may have been a bit of an "overcorrection". Given the somewhat unique situation, how have investors generally been handling this issue?
I would talk someone at a law firm or consultancy that specializes in NYC property tax to better understand how property tax works there. It's complicated... Yes, the assessments went down on aggregate more than after the financial crisis, but it's likely Dept. of finance will just jump them back up (hard to argue against when they were so generous with the drop). These professionals also tend to know people at DOF and will have color on where they think things are going.
Also, 3.0% trend is aggressive if you're underwriting any sort of value-add or pre-stabilized project. In office, it's typically like 25%-30% of trailing 2 year EGR depending on class, vintage, capital spend, building margin, etc. If you have a big pop in the top line, it will eventually show up in taxes.
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