VALDOSTA, Ga. (WALB) – After a recent Georgia Supreme Court ruling, affordable housing developers were optimistic that fairer tax assessments would allow their projects to move forward with less legal headache.

The state Supreme Court ruled that tax assessors must value affordable housing using the income approach — meaning that they are taxed on the rent they collect, not necessarily on the market value of the unit.

That decision ended a decade-long dispute in Lowndes County.

Developers like IDP Properties said the long fight over grueling tax evaluations forced multiple appeals before reaching the state’s highest court.

“Now you’re not just impacting the business owners,” President of IDP Properties Rhett Holmes said. “You’re impacting the residents who have to live at the properties. Now you’re having to use taxpayers money to deal with these appeals, so there are a lot of people impacted by this process.”

IDP Properties is now facing similar challenges in Tift and Dougherty counties, where a third-party company, Georgia Mass Appraisal Solutions and Services (GMass), plays a key role in the tax process.

GMass uses technology to appraise properties and then give data to the county tax accessors offices that hire them.

“I’m hoping this will give some clearer guidance to accessors out there, and third parties counties are hiring to do their evaluation,” Holmes said. “We have not seen an evaluation since the Supreme Court ruling, so we’re waiting to see how that plays out.”

Developers are calling for permanent fixes to keep affordable housing truly affordable, including a clearer statewide standard for evaluations and a cap on how much counties can raise property taxes after reassessments.

“At the rate the property tax assessments are going, we’re going to be producing less and less affordable housing throughout the state of Georgia — not just in rural and not just in urban, everywhere. So we have to fix the problem,” Holmes said.

WALB reached out to GMass for comment on their role in South Georgia’s tax assessments but have not yet heard back.

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