Justin Eimers - Fariness, Funding, and the Future of Assessing

There's a disconnect in our profession that keeps me up at night. We're the equity experts, the fairness champions who ensure every property owner pays their fair share. Yet too many offices can't seem to apply that same principle to their own staff.

Justin Eimers, an assessment advisor at IAAO, recently shared something that should make us all pause: "Assessors are passionate about equity and fairness. I think that's got to start at home."

He's right. And the data backs him up.

The Hidden Cost of Neglecting Compensation

When I talk to assessors around the country, staffing challenges dominate the conversation. But here's what's interesting—it's rarely about finding warm bodies. It's about keeping good people.

Eimers laid out the cascade effect perfectly: "If you're not [checking salaries regularly], you're looking at retention problems, recruitment problems, staffing stability issues. You're going to have pay compression issues. You can create resentment within the office."

Think about what happens when your best appraiser realizes the new hire makes almost as much as they do after five years of service. Or when your commercial specialist gets poached by a neighboring jurisdiction that actually ran a salary study.

The administrative burden alone should terrify us. Every departure means months of training, lost institutional knowledge, and a backlog that grows while you scramble to fill the position.

The Salary Study Solution Most Offices Ignore

Here's the shocking part: Most offices don't regularly review compensation. We meticulously revalue properties on cycles, update depreciation tables annually, and run ratio studies to ensure fairness. But checking if we're paying our people fairly? That gets pushed to "someday."

Eimers shared his approach from his days running a small Kansas county: "Every year before budget time... I would email all my surrounding counties and get their pay grades and pay tables. Did it take me like a week to put the data together? Yeah. But I felt like it was worth it."

A week. That's all it took to gather data, compare positions, adjust for local economic factors, and build a case for fair compensation.

The payoff? When budget time came, he wasn't begging for arbitrary increases. He had data: "You're not just going in there saying, 'Well, I'd like another 3%.' You've got actual data that says, 'Hey, we should be paying this.'"

Why This Matters More Than Ever

The profession faces unprecedented challenges. States are cranking down on local control. Abolish-property-tax movements gain steam while we struggle to explain our value. Technology promises efficiency gains but requires skilled operators.

Meanwhile, we're asking our teams to implement increasingly complex exemptions that Eimers notes can require "a 14-step math problem just to calculate." We're defending values against sophisticated appeals. We're educating a skeptical public while managing software transitions and legislative changes.

Can we really afford to lose our best people over compensation?

The Path Forward

Start simple. You don't need a $50,000 consulting contract to begin addressing pay equity. Follow Eimers' template:

1. Gather regional data - Email neighboring jurisdictions for pay scales
2. Adjust for comparability - Account for population, parcel count, local economics
3. Identify gaps - See where you fall in the percentile rankings
4. Build your case - Present data, not emotions, to decision-makers
5. Repeat annually - Just like revaluation, this needs regular cycles

The irony shouldn't be lost on us. We're the profession that ensures a mansion pays more than a modest home, that similar properties carry similar tax burdens. Yet we often fail to ensure similar positions carry similar salaries.

As one young assessor recently told me, he's using AI to handle routine tasks so he can "pay my current appraisers more so I can get more talent density." That's strategic thinking. That's how we build offices that can meet tomorrow's challenges.

Key Takeaway

Fair property valuation starts with fairly valued people. If we can run regression models, analyze sales ratios, and defend complex commercial assessments, we can certainly manage a basic salary study. The question isn't whether you can afford to do it—it's whether you can afford not to.

Your best people know their worth. The only question is whether they'll realize it working for you or for someone else.