Borough property tax assessments in the mail. Average home value rises 7.4%, assembly told

It’s that time of year again. Property valuation notices are being mailed out from the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and to no one’s surprise, appraisal values are up.

The average value of a Mat-Su single-family homes is up 7.41% over last year, borough assessor Oliver Querin told the assembly at its Tuesday, Jan. 21 meeting. This is an average, so values may be higher or lower for individual properties.

What’s important is that this doesn’t mean the borough’s property tax on a home will rise by that amount, Borough Manager Mike Brown told the assembly. The assessment and tax are two different things, he said. State law requires municipalities to assess property based on the “full and true” market value, and once the assessment is complete the borough assembly sets a property tax mill rate to be applied to a property value.

This also happens after the assembly finishes work on the borough’s budget, which also comes in late spring, Brown said. In practice the borough has been able to hold mill rate at reasonable levels even though assessed values are rising.

The borough’s assessors depend on a variety of information sources and in practice the assessed value estimate typically lags what a property can actually be sold for. Because the appraised value is an estimate based on the best available information property owners can and often do challenge the appraisals though an appeal process, Querin said. The appeal period begins Jan. 28 and runs through Feb. 22. Hearings on appeals are held in April and the borough must finalize its assessment by May 29, he said.

Meanwhile, the annual property assessments also provide a picture of economic conditions in Mat-Su, which continue to be positive. Residential and commercial construction continue to grow, which expands the tax base. “Since late 2025, sixty percent of new home construction in Alaska has been in the Mat-Su,” Querin said. However, construction costs are also rising due to labor and materials costs as well as inflation.

Residential properties on typical smaller lots appear to have appraisal values at about 94% of actual market prices but it’s a different story larger tracts of vacant and undeveloped and vacant properties. Appraisals on those appear to be at about 50% of the actual market and in some parts of the borough at 40% or less of market value.

The borough is now taking steps to address the differential because of unfairness of owners of vacant lands or homes on large land tracts appraised lower than small lots with single-family homes. A first move on this will be to uniformly raise assessed values of vacant land by 15% this year as the first step in a six-year plan reduce the differential. Over six years reassessments on vacant land values will be done across six parts of the borough, or one part per year.

“A 15% one-time bump this year will bring us closer,” but it will take time to reduce the differential” borough manager Brown said. “This is not going to be popular but once we know we have a problem we have to do something,” to bring things into balance, he told the assembly.