Assessor Jackie Davis presented the Anchorage Municipality’s preliminary 2026 property valuations on Jan. 9, reporting a total assessed value near $59.8 billion and a taxable base weighted roughly 68% residential, 25% commercial and about 8% personal property. Davis said the office expects the new personal property exemption—rising from $20,000 to $100,000—to produce roughly a 4% drop in personal property valuations and less than a half‑percent reduction in the total tax base for 2026.

Davis said the assessor’s office administers two core functions—exemptions and valuation—and that the statutory valuation date remains Jan. 1. “For this 2026 tax year…we anticipate probably about a less than a half of a reduction to the total tax base,” Davis said, describing the effect of the higher personal-property exemption.

The presentation highlighted recent methodological changes. The office refined cost tables and simplified quality‑of‑construction adjustments to reduce small category noise, consolidated numerous market areas down to about 17–18 to avoid over‑stratification, and said it uses both in‑person inspections and 2024 aerial imagery to meet a goal of physically inspecting properties on a six‑year cycle.

On multifamily classification, Davis said fourplexes were treated as residential in the current year while five‑unit buildings and larger remain classified as commercial—an adjustment that slightly alters the composition of residential versus commercial slices but does not change total assessed dollars. “When we change it this year…fourplexes are kind of that gray line; we put it in the residential pocket,” Davis said.

New‑construction activity lifted taxable construction values by about 22% year over year, Davis said, driven by four large projects: a FedEx warehouse at the airport, a Marriott hotel on C Street, a large Kendall Auto dealership, and redevelopment tied to a former KeyBank/Peach Holdings property. Commercial sectors—industrial, apartments and retail—showed notable gains; hotels in particular are recovering from pandemic declines.

Davis also summarized exemption totals, saying roughly $15 billion of assessed value is exempt, split between mandatory (state/federal) and optional local exemptions, and cited about $3.2 billion in senior/disabled‑veteran exemptions across more than 20,000 claims. He said the majority of senior/disabled‑vet exemptions are seniors and that appeal and certification processes continue to be monitored.

The office described data limitations from being a nondisclosure state but reported sale‑ratio performance near its 96% target—set conservatively because of January‑1 seasonality—and noted ongoing statistical testing to monitor regressivity.

The next steps: evaluation notices will be mailed, staff will continue outreach to affected property owners, and the office will provide more detailed breakdowns on request, including follow‑up analysis on how market area and classification shifts affect the residential/commercial split.