Wilmington City Councilwoman Christian Willauer filed a complaint with New Castle County that calls out property assessment inequities for the city's Hilltop, Tilton, and West City Center neighborhoods.
In a study she presented at Louis L. Redding City/County Building Wednesday, she said homes sold in these areas between January 1, 2022 to January 30, 2024 went for less than their most recent assessed value.
For Hilltop, 71% of properties sold went for less than their assessed value. In Tilton, 64% went for less. And for West Center City 61% sold for under their assessed value.
“That's what we're asking New Castle County to do,” Willauer said. “Come out, look at the assessments in these election districts.”
She said if it doesn’t, these areas, “are subsidizing the tax burden of other areas, like Greenville.”
By contrast in her examination of home sales information for the Hoopes Reservoir area in Greenville, only 23% of properties sold during the same time frame got assessed at 10% more than what they actually sold for.
And in the Wegman’s area of Greenville, only 9% of properties got assessed at 10% more than their sales price.
The complaint she’s submitted isn’t legal in nature. It refers to Delaware code that requires, “All property subject to assessment shall be assessed at its fair market value as of the date of the most recent reassessment base year in the county.”
Willauer said her examination makes clear the standards didn’t get applied equally.
“We take concerns about the fairness and accuracy of property assessment seriously. We will review the letter with our county law department and determine the legal framework that may apply.”
She added the city of Wilmington has provided the county with permitting data, to identify properties that have been renovated. And it has property characteristic information already for homes, like numbers of bedrooms and bathrooms
This combined will be sufficient to determine accurate assessment values, she said. And it doesn’t have to be a mass reappraisal for the whole county. She identified approximately two thousand parcels, which she said are mostly residential.
When contacted after the press conference, a representative for New Castle County said, “We take concerns about the fairness and accuracy of property assessment seriously. We will review the letter with our county law department and determine the legal framework that may apply.”
One resident who lives in the Cool Springs neighborhood, Jamell Harkins, said he bought his home in 2021 for $175 thousand. And it was reassessed to $280 thousand in 2024.
Initially that didn’t bother him, “because I figured, well, I gained $100 thousand in equity versus when I started seeing the trickle effect of what that value actually represents. It represents a higher tax obligation.”
Taxes for him have gone from $1 thousand annually, and now he’s over $2,400.
“I would like to think that my house is worth that much, and it probably is,” he said. “To me, it's worth more than that. But let's do a proper assessment.”
Willauer wants the corrections made before school tax bills go out, in mid-November.
