Jake Parkinson - Commercial Land Valuation and the Future of the Assessment Field

Every assessor knows the sinking feeling: You're staring at a commercial property that needs valuation, and your comparable sales database shows exactly four transactions. For the entire year. In a county with 34,000 parcels.

Welcome to the reality Jake Parkinson faces daily as Tooele County Assessor in Utah, a non-disclosure state where even those precious few sales come wrapped in proprietary restrictions.

The Art of Inference

"You have to build a model," Parkinson explains, though he's quick to add that calling it a model might be generous. "You have to start drawing inferences from past year sales and project those values into other areas."

His approach reveals the sophisticated thinking required when traditional methods fail us. Take his example of an industrial depot conversion with World War II-era warehouses sitting next to Carvana's gleaming 400-acre complex. When you have a three-year-old vacant land sale and this year's improved property sale, you work backwards:

Study the market movement on improved properties between those years. Allocate value to the land component. Calculate a percentage change. Apply it forward.

It's not perfect, but it's defensible, and that matters when taxpayers come calling.

The Fairness Imperative

Here's what keeps many of us up at night: When commercial valuations lag market reality, the tax burden doesn't disappear. It shifts.

"If we don't push it, the tax burden shifts to the residential side," Parkinson notes. "We can set an accurate value on the residential side... so it's unfair to the residential taxpayers if I don't do as much as I can to push the commercial side."

This isn't about being aggressive, it's about maintaining the fundamental promise of uniformity that underpins our entire system. In non-disclosure states, we're often still low even after our best efforts. But doing nothing year after year because "we don't have sales" creates a compounding problem that eventually explodes into 300% increases and furious taxpayers.

The Power of Collective Intelligence

Perhaps the most valuable insight Parkinson offers has nothing to do with valuation techniques. It's about breaking out of our silos.

"Every time you're in a room, there's somebody doing something better than you are," he observes. When faced with revaluing storage units, he didn't reinvent the wheel. He called four counties and asked for their processes. They sent not just methodologies but actual data, rent rolls, expense ratios, the works.

This transformed a data-poor situation into one where he could walk into a hearing armed with market rent information from 45 comparable facilities across neighboring counties. "It's not my fault you're not charging market rent" becomes a defensible position backed by regional data.

Evolving Beyond Traditional Structures

Looking forward, Parkinson sees assessment offices moving away from armies of individual appraisers doing property-by-property cost approaches. The future lies in "data collectors, having a smart, inquisitive, curious appraiser in the office and then working through GIS and with statistical models."

Even small counties with "only" 1,500 clean sales annually have enough data to build reliable models for population centers. The barrier isn't technology or data, it's leadership willing to pivot from 35-year-old workflows.

His office structure reflects this evolution: staff build valuations from the ground up, understanding the entire process rather than being siloed into single tasks. They work remotely three days a week, armed with laptops and tracking software that ensures productivity while offering the flexibility that attracts top talent.

The Question We're Not Asking

There's an uncomfortable truth embedded in Parkinson's approach: Many of us leave value on the table because we're afraid of the confrontation that comes with increases based on inference rather than recent sales. We wait for the "perfect" comparable that never comes, while market values drift ever further from our assessments.

But what if the real risk isn't in making defensible inferences, it's in doing nothing? What if maintaining public trust requires us to be more creative, more collaborative, and yes, more willing to defend valuations built on careful analysis rather than perfect data?

Key Takeaways

When data is scarce, methodology matters more: Document your inference process. Show your work. Build a defensible narrative that acknowledges uncertainty while demonstrating professional diligence.

Silos kill innovation: Your neighboring counties face the same challenges. Share data, compare methods, build regional understanding. The taxpayer arguing about storage unit rents doesn't care about county lines.

Fairness demands action: Waiting for perfect data while tax burdens shift silently between property classes violates our fundamental duty. Sometimes the most conservative choice is to move forward with careful estimates rather than preserve obviously outdated values.

The future is already here: Small counties running statistical models. Remote work attracting talent. Data collectors feeding smart analysis. The question isn't whether to evolve, it's whether you'll lead the change or be dragged along by it.

As Parkinson notes, "Nobody grew up saying, I want to be an assessor." But those of us who found our way here carry a profound responsibility: ensuring that the property tax system remains fair, uniform, and worthy of public trust. In a world of imperfect data, that's not a science, it's an art worth mastering.