Many St. Louis property owners see big appraisal hikes

Marine Villa resident Sarah Ulrich says she was floored earlier this month when she got a postcard in the mail from the St. Louis Assessor’s Office, telling her that two nearby rental properties she owns had gone up in value—significantly. 

One property’s appraised value more than doubled, from $67,000 to $175,000, while another quintupled, from $20,000 to $100,000. The sense she got from talking to neighbors was that she was hardly an outlier. 

“It’s everyone,” Ulrich says. “Everyone is getting hit.” She calls it “alarming.” Higher property values mean higher property taxes due at the end of the year. Under 2024 rates, a house assessed at $100,000 would owe around $1,590 in property taxes, while a $200,000 house would generate a bill of about $3,180. 

Shawn Ordway, the city’s interim assessor, says that he understands Ulrich’s surprise. “It is sticker shock,” he says. 

And Ulrich is unlikely to be alone in feeling this way.

State law mandates that property be reassessed every two years, and this year about 100,000 properties in the city will go up in assessment. That’s not unusual; around the same number did so in 2023 as well. But what is unusual is that many properties in areas of southeast city, including Marine Villa, have been undervalued—and now the assessor’s office has made it a priority to get those assessments in line with reality. That means whiplash for a lot of property owners. 

Asked how those southeast city properties became undervalued, Ordway doesn’t mince words. “I wish I had a good sound bite answer. I don’t,” he says. “There’s no excuse. We didn’t do a good job.”

Ordway’s office divides the city into 163 assessor neighborhoods, and he says they identified 14 that needed to be looked at very closely, with assessed values way below what they should have been. The affected area includes a wide swath of Southeast City, from Tower Grove East all the way to the Patch. 

One of the criteria that determines an assessment is the property’s condition; each parcel is given a general label like “fair” and “poor” and so on. Sales data suggested that modestly priced properties in southeast city were not being categorized correctly, Ordway says. 

“I’ve got sales galore,” Ordway says, indicating as an example one property that the city had valued at $28,000. “It sold in 2023 for $70,000. I’ve got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of examples of sales like that in these areas.”

Ordway says that the issues related to the southeast city property values were first noticed in 2021 and that a parcel-by-parcel review began then. That review could not be completed in time for the 2023 re-assessement, which is why the notices causing the sticker shock are just going out now. 

A longtime assessor’s office employee, Ordway has led the office in an interim role since January, when former Assessor Michael Dauphin left to become a circuit court judge. “There’s nobody in the state who has better grip on this than Shawn,” Dauphin says.  

Under state law, any time a property’s assessed value goes up by 15 percent or more, the city must notify the owner. That’s why Ordway is mailing out the postcards like the one Ulrich got earlier this month. The city is also required to inspect the exterior of the property. If the homeowner feels their assessed value is too high, they can ask an inspector to look at the interior as well. 

Ulrich says she’s not sure she wants to do that. What if that only shoots the value further north?

Ordway says that’s unlikely. 

“We’re not coming out there to raise anything,” he says. “I can’t give a 100 percent guarantee, but we would have to walk in and see, you know, gold-plated stuff.”

While Ordway says he has been hearing from plenty of people about the spike in assessed values, he expects that the real upset will come in May. That’s when another round of notices will go out—and those will include the actual tax amounts due by the end of the year.