Why Should Delaware Care?
Assessed property values are the foundational piece of how property taxes are assessed for homeowners and commercial property owners. After values were reset for the first time in 40 years, many New Castle County property owners decried the impact that the new values had on their property.
New Castle County intends to reassess every property in northern Delaware a year earlier than previously planned after a recent audit of dozens of commercial properties found more errors.
County Executive Marcus Henry made the announcement Thursday in a statement sent out alongside the audit report.
Completed by real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, the report examined 50 commercial properties throughout the county whose assessments went down more than the median, or were lower than a recent sale.
It describes how investigators found a variety of discrepancies, including misstated building sizes, inaccurate property classifications, and even erroneous room counts for hotels and apartment buildings. One shopping center was found to have been classified as an office building.
Those errors have largely been attributed to the fact that New Castle County’s property data contains errors after decades without a reassessment, according to David Del Grande, the county’s chief finance officer. Assessors from Tyler Technologies, the contractor hired by the county to complete the court-mandated reassessment, only did exterior assessments of properties and relied upon data from the county for interior features.
Those errors were compounded by the fact that only about 1% of commercial property owners responded to surveys about their properties that would have added necessary building details and information about the income it produced, Del Grande added. The county also pointed to years of missing permitting data from municipalities, including the city of Wilmington.
Further adding to the issues that plagued the reassessment was that New Castle County was in the midst of switching its digital software to record the appraisal information while Tyler Technologies was doing its reassessment, Del Grande said.
“It could have been data that was in the wrong field coming from the old system to the new system. It could have been data overridden by Tyler in the new system. It could be a variety of things,” he told Spotlight Delaware.
The findings of the Cushman & Wakefield report only compound the questions raised early this year, when the county separately corrected a handful of enormous assessment errors related to an Amazon fulfillment center near Newport, and to apartments and a parking garage in downtown Wilmington.
Despite these issues, both the report and Del Grande denied that it was indicative of broader issues with the integrity of the overall reassessment in New Castle County, but rather an expected growing pain with resetting decades of inaction.
The discovered issues have convinced county leaders to move ahead more quickly with the next reassessment though. Under the new state law, reassessment must occur every five years, but this expedited review would occur after just four.
“We want to make sure that the public is confident with the numbers that we have as their assessed values as being as being fully accurate to the best that they can be,” Del Grande said.
A tortured reassessment process
The recent findings, as well as the county’s decision to push forward the next reassessment, mark the latest in two years of acrimony that followed New Castle County’s first-in-a-generation property reassessment.
The results of the reassessment initially sparked outrage from many homeowners whose property tax bills spiked, while some businesses saw their tax liabilities go down. Lawmakers responded in 2025 by enacting several pieces of legislation, including one bill that allowed New Castle County and its area school districts to charge a different tax rate for business and residential properties.
That resulted in a lawsuit by landlords that was ultimately struck down by the Delaware Supreme Court late last year.
Thousands of property owners filed appeals of their assessments in 2025, of which about 200 commercial properties have yet to be resolved, Del Grande said. This year, another 1,600 appeals were filed, including a mix of residential and commercial property.
Concerns around the accuracy of business property valuations prompted state lawmakers to authorize the inquiry of New Castle County business properties that ended with Thursday’s report.
“From the beginning, we wanted an independent review because we needed to know where improvements were necessary,” Henry said in a statement.
What’s next?
Next, county officials will develop and then advertise a new request for contractors to submit bids to conduct the next property reassessment.
County officials are targeting July 2028 as their date for completing the base property assessments – one year earlier than previously planned.
Those assessments would then appear on 2029 tax bills, according to the county.
According to Del Grande, the next reassessment will again be completed by a third-party vendor, and that nothing in the latest audit findings would preclude Tyler Technologies from being included among the bidders considered by the county.
New Castle County has hired 10 employees in its assessment office and has funding to hire 10 more, but they are tasked with reviewing the more than 1,000 property appeals now expected to be filed on an annual basis.
If completed on time, the earlier reassessment would be completed ahead of the 2028 elections, when Henry could be on the ballot, if he seeks re-election.
Editor-In-Chief Jacob Owens contributed to this story.
