Tyler Technologies did not collect permitting data while reassessing property values in Wilmington, state legislators learned at Tuesday’s General Assembly Special Committee hearing on the state’s first tax reassessment in 40 years.
Mass appraisals typically look at exteriors, comparable sales nearby and public information associated with parcels that the city stores, including permits.
But Wilmington Mayor John Carney’s Chief of Staff Cerron Cade noted that Tyler Technologies did not use permitting data for the city’s properties, which could have affected city valuations.
“And what this means is that properties throughout the City of Wilmington – many of them in some of our hardest hit neighborhoods – have been assessed at values that are much higher than their true market value, which means that those residents would end up having to pay more taxes on those properties then they should have to,” Cade said.
Tyler Technologies’ report on its mass appraisal of New Castle County said its performance in Zone 3, which represents Wilmington, did not live up to industry standards.
The coefficient of dispersion shows how spread out data sets are from one another. Wilmington’s COD was the highest of all eight zones at 22.68, with the acceptable maximum at 15.0, according to Tyler’s report.
Tyler acknowledged Wilmington as an outlier in its reassessment of the county, as the other seven zones did not see high CODs.
“The practical explanation for this is likely attributable to: a) verified transactions for sold properties from the sales study in this area typically superior compared to the universe of unsold parcels – i.e. the sales are not normally distributed relative to the universe (condition is superior for sold parcels) and b) the interior condition of the housing stock is a major driver of value and was not reasonably ascertained during an exterior inspection of the parcels in Zone 3,” the report said.
In other words, rehab or updated properties in Wilmington contributed to the raised values of unupdated homes.
“What it means for a lot of those residents is that their homes value in the assessment could potentially be much higher than what they could actually sell their property for, which means that they're paying a higher amount of taxes than they should be paying,” Cade said.
But Tyler Technologies’ Senior Vice President of Property and Recording Jake Wilson argued that a high-percentage COD could be misleading and actually be acceptable when converted to dollar amounts.
“This is an area that has a very diverse housing stock,” Wilson said. “There are rehabbed homes and non-rehabbed homes. There are millions of pieces of data that have gone into these assessments. Our methods are strong to collect all that information, and we stand by our results that are there. But that coefficient of dispersion number is not abnormal for that area.”
Tyler Technologies did not collect permitting data from the City of Wilmington past 2022 or 2023, according to Wilson.
“We communicated our concerns with our client. We had regular update meetings regarding that information, sharing project progress, etc, etc, approximately 70 times throughout the duration of our project,” Wilson said Tuesday.
The Special Committee hearing did not come to a consensus on whose responsibility it was to get permitting data from the city to Tyler Technologies. Because New Castle County handled the reassessment, county staff would have had to pass on the data from the City of Wilmington – which stores its own data – to Tyler Technologies.
It’s up in the air whether Tyler failed to request it or if the county did not provide the data.
“It may have just been an error and oversight, I don't know,” Cade said. “But I don't want to really get into kind of pointing the fingers. I just don't know who would have been responsible for communicating with us. All I know is that request wasn't made to the City of Wilmington.”
House Speaker State Rep. Melissa Minor-Brown (D-New Castle) leaned on Wilson’s number, saying county staff and at Tyler saw what was needed 70 times.
“So at the end of the day, the information didn't get to where it was supposed to go,” Minor-Brown said. “And because of that, these numbers came out wrong. And at the end of the day, it impacts people's lives, people's finances, people's houses, people's quality of life. Somebody's in trouble because it should've happened.”
Wilmington City Councilmember Christian Willauer told Delaware Public Media the missing data led Tyler to make no distinction between properties with renovations and ones without.
“And a lot of people have called me who live in the Fifth District saying, ‘This isn't fair. I couldn't sell my house for this assessment. This assessment is too high. It's the government's job to get the assessments right, and I shouldn't have to pay taxes on an assessment that's more than what I could sell my house for,’” Willauer said.
Willauer attended the hearing Tuesday and spoke during the public comment section, highlighting some Wilmington property owners who saw property taxes jump by more than 200%.
“People in the Fifth District are scared by the new tax bills they received,” Willauer said at the hearing. “Many of them cannot afford these new bills that are thousands more than they paid last year.”
Cade said city staff are still working out how Wilmington can prepare for future assessments and look out for the errors Tyler made.
The Special Committee meets again in Dover next week to continue discussing the state’s reassessment process.
