New Assessments Show Milwaukee Property Values Grew 15% Last Year

Houses in Bay View. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Milwaukee property owners might experience sticker shock when their new assessed values arrive in the mail next week.

Citywide, property values climbed 15.4% last year according to a new report from the Assessor’s Office. The average Milwaukee home, including condominiums, is now valued at $210,511.

Because property values climbed citywide, including commercial properties, the actual impact to an individual tax bill may be limited.

The assessment process is separate from actually levying property taxes and does not impact the amount of revenue the city can collect. As defined in state law, the assessment process is used to determine the fair market value of each of the more than 150,000 properties in Milwaukee.

Assessments and property taxes are linked in a way that can be best compared to dividing up the check at a restaurant, a metaphor first offered several years ago by Ald. Scott Spiker. Assessments determine the portion of the property tax levy that each property owner will pay by calculating their share of the total. Both the tax levy and assessment processes are governed by state law, with the tax levy being effectively capped.

A very rough rule of thumb, which was temporarily invalidated last year when the Milwaukee Public Schools referendum increased the district’s tax levy, is that if an individual property’s value increases less than the citywide average, the property tax bill will not grow.

Milwaukee’s residential and commercial properties are now assessed for a combined $47.2 billion, up from $40.9 billion last year and $30.5 billion in 2021.

Reversing a recent trend, commercial property values grew more than residential properties. The change will reduce the share of the property tax burden shouldered by residential homeowners. Commercial properties climbed 17.11% in value, while residential properties climbed 14.39%. Apartments, classified as a commercial property type, led the way with a 22.6% increase, while residential condominiums climbed 10.8%. The state assesses manufacturing properties through a separate process.

The 15.4% increase follows a 17.4% increase in 2024. However, the 2024 increase effectively covered a two-year period, as 2023 was a maintenance year during which not all properties were individually reassessed. Assessment Commissioner Nicole Larsen, in presenting her office’s budget in October, said she would like to conduct reassessments annually due to the hot real estate market and a state law that requires assessments to be based on fair market values. “Revaluing is the way to keep our assessments in line with what the market is doing,” she said. “Assessments need to be fair and equitable. That’s our baseline.” The assessed values for residential properties are designed to reflect the fair market value of a property on Jan. 1.

Governed by state law, the city’s assessment process relies on data from the sale of comparable properties and more than 140 assessor-defined neighborhoods. A software model compares properties and is mixed with data on property conditions, property style, size and other factors. The assessor does not visit each of the city’s properties.

Assessments did not increase uniformly, with the fastest-increasing aldermanic district more than tripling the growth rate of the slowest-increasing district.

The 15th District, the city’s most impoverished, covers the middle of the city and saw its residential values climb 24%. The 3rd District, which covers portions of Riverwest and the East Side, saw its value increase only 8%. But the average increase in the 3rd District was $28,526 to a $386,004 average, while the 15th District saw a $21,041 increase to $108,683 (median value $73,800). The 3rd District has the highest median value at $313,750, while the 6th District to its west has the second-lowest at $84,100.

The 4th District, which includes Downtown and the Near West Side, remains the city’s most valuable with $8.2 billion of assessed value, 17% of the city total, across all property classes. It also offers a tale of two cities. Its average residential value is $419,974, an almost $40,000 increase from last year. But the median value is $304,400, a $115,574 gap that is larger than the average value of a home in the neighboring 15th District. Urban Milwaukee members can see detailed figures in the attached PDF included in the Legislation Link section below.

Since 2020, the city has maintained a trend where residential properties in each district have increased in value. It’s a reversal of a divergence that emerged after the Great Recession, where the city’s highest-value districts continued to grow, while its lower-value districts lost value.

Property owners have until Monday, May 19, at 4:45 p.m. to file an appeal under a process known as “Open Book.” If the Assessor’s Office declines to make any change, property owners may then appeal to the city’s Board of Review and ultimately to the state court system. Several thousand appeals were filed during the recent revaluations, but the Assessor’s Office previously reported it has addressed a lengthy backlog of cases. “It was a mountain of Board of Review appeals that we had pending and we’ve eliminated it entirely,” said Larsen at her office’s October budget hearing.

Larsen has served as the Assessment Commissioner since 2022. Bill Bowers is the Chief Assessor, Larsen’s deputy.

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