General Property Reassessment: Relative Tax Impacts on Land and on Structures

A bstract . Many jurisdictions require periodic mass reassessment of real property to bring assessed values closer to market values and to reallocate tax burdens among property types. This paper examines the influence of general reassessment on the tax burden on land relative to that on improvements in Indiana, a state using elected local assessors, statewide mass reassessment on a regular cycle, and assessment of structures at hypothetical reproduction cost. Examination of data over the 1950-51 to 1974-75 period shows that economic growth and development reallocates property tax impact away from land: the share of land in the base declines and the effective rate paid on any given parcel of land declines. Reassessment adjusts these impacts. While reassessment increases the share of improvements in the total base, the readjustment for land is larger. From this analysis, the most recent mass assessment (1968) increased the land to improvement ratio by about 42 percent.