Every year the county assessor puts a market value on your commercial building, and your tax bill follows that number. In most states you would fight it by showing what comparable buildings actually sold for. In Utah you cannot, because Utah is a non-disclosure state: sale prices are not public record. That single fact changes how a Utah appeal works, and it is the reason the appeal that wins here is built on a different kind of evidence.
Why Utah appeals run on assessed values, not sale prices
In a disclosure state, the assessor and the appellant both argue from recorded sale prices. Utah keeps those prices private, so neither side can lean on them as the primary evidence. What is public is the assessor's own work: the assessed value placed on every commercial parcel on the statewide roll. That becomes the evidence. If the county assessed the building next door to yours — same use, similar size, similar age, same submarket — well below what it assessed you, that gap is on the record in the county's own numbers. You are not asking the Board to believe your opinion of value. You are asking it to reconcile two of the assessor's own figures.
This is the heart of equalization. The Utah Constitution requires property to be taxed uniformly. When like properties carry unlike assessments, the higher one is out of line, and the law gives you a way to bring it back.
What Utah Code §59-2-1004 actually says
Under Utah Code §59-2-1004, a property owner may appeal either the valuation of a property or its equalization. The valuation argument says the number itself is too high. The equalization argument says the number is out of line with comparable assessed values, regardless of whether it is defensible in the abstract.
The equalization argument is the one that fits a non-disclosure state, and it has a concrete trigger. The working standard is roughly five percent: when your assessment exceeds the assessed values of genuinely comparable properties by more than about five percent, the county Board of Equalization can equalize your value down to match. The practical recipe is simple to state:
Supply the Board with comparable parcels — adjusted for the real differences — assessed materially below yours, and the case for an equalization reduction is made out of the county's own records.
The ±5% idea, in plain terms
Think of it as a tolerance band. Two buildings are never identical, so the law does not demand a perfect match. But once the gap between your assessment and your true peers' assessments runs past roughly five percent — after you have honestly accounted for the ways the properties differ — the difference is no longer noise. It is a measurable inequity the Board can correct.
The deadline that runs the whole thing
Utah's calendar is unforgiving and it matters more than anything else in this process. Notices of value generally mail in the summer, and the appeal window opens around August. The deadline to file with the county Board of Equalization is September 15. Miss it and you wait a full year, paying the higher bill the entire time. Because the window is short, the work that decides whether you have a case — pulling comparables and running the adjustments — has to happen before the notices even land.
How we build the case
We read the commercial, industrial, and multifamily parcels across the four Wasatch Front counties — Salt Lake, Utah, Davis, and Weber — straight off the statewide assessment roll. For a building in Salt Lake County, that means comparing your assessment against the county's own assessed values for true peer properties.
A higher number, by itself, is not proof of anything. Properties differ for real reasons — size, age, condition, location — and a fair comparison has to account for them. So before we ever tell you that you have a case, we adjust the comparables for size, age, and location and measure you against genuine peers' assessed values. If the gap survives those adjustments and clears the equalization threshold, you have something the Board can act on. If it does not, we tell you that too. We do not name owners, we do not guess, and we work only from the county's own public records.
Who files, and what it costs
The model finds the case; it does not file it. A licensed Utah agent reviews the analysis, files the appeal, and represents you at the Board of Equalization hearing. That human gate is deliberate — a person who is accountable for the filing stands behind it.
On cost: this is a contingency arrangement. There is no upfront fee. You pay only if your assessed value comes down, and our founding-year rate is ten percent of your first-year tax savings. If the value does not drop, you owe nothing.
One honest caveat. We are a new company, and every figure we produce is derived from public assessment records. It is a well-founded estimate of whether an equalization argument exists — not a promise of any particular outcome. The Board decides. What we can promise is that we will read the county's own numbers carefully and tell you plainly whether the math is on your side. If you want the broader picture across states, our guides walk through how each one works.