Assessor-Recorder Joaquín Torres Shares Progress Made on Assessment Backlog & Notifies Taxpayers

San Francisco, CA – today, Assessor-Recorder Joaquín Torres shared data showing that the Office of the Assessor-Recorder has made meaningful progress over the past year to address the unprecedented workload driven by the pandemic’s disruption of the San Francisco economy. In fiscal year 2025-2026, the Office resolved approximately 7,600 assessment appeals and completed more than 13,000 assessable events.

Despite this progress, a backlog remains and the Office is mailing letters this month to taxpayers whose assessable events make up the backlog. These letters, which are being sent for the fourth year, seek to ensure affected taxpayers are aware of delays and aim to help with understanding and mitigating potential impacts. The letters also direct taxpayers to the Assessor’s supplemental tax calculator, which can help them estimate their future tax burdens after an assessable event.

“Even before its impacts were fully known to the Office, it was clear the pandemic had the potential to upend our services in ways San Franciscans would feel,” said Assessor-Recorder Joaquín Torres. “Transforming both our operations and how we communicate with affected taxpayers has been important to me from the beginning. This is not the first time this Office has experienced a backlog, but proactively reaching out to alert taxpayers to the delays and provide helpful information is new. There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, but so long as there are still delays, I’m going to continue to ensure affected San Franciscans are notified.”

“So often people view their government processes as a faceless and nameless mystery. That is not the case with the Assessor-Recorder's Office,” said Chris Chang, co-founder of IDEATE SF, a coalition of residents and businesses in San Francisco's high-density Downtown, Embarcadero, and Transbay East-Cut neighborhoods. “Assessor Torres has presented our residents and businesses with clear information about how his Office has been working to solve the challenges in front of them, as well as demystifying the assessment process. No matter whether the news is good, bad, or both, he goes the extra mile to keep us informed, openly and transparently.”

A Historic Spike in Appeals

Assessment appeals began rising in 2021. New filings then increased six-fold from a pre-pandemic average of 1,400 per year to approximately 8,000 in 2023-2024, 9,200 in 2024-2025, and 9,000 in 2025-2026; the highest levels in at least 25 years. Incoming regular assessments have stayed roughly constant across the same period.

This workload challenge is compounded by the fact that unless waived by the taxpayer, all appeals must be heard within two years of submittal or else the taxpayer’s stated opinion of value (often very low) is automatically accepted. Such an outcome runs strongly counter to the Assessor’s mission to ensure a fair, accurate, and stable property tax base. By comparison, state law provides four years to perform regular assessments. For this reason, when necessary, the Assessor prioritizes appeals above regular assessment production. Meeting those deadlines has necessitated reassigning appraisers from our regular assessment work, a decision that assured a new assessment backlog. The Office experienced a similar pattern following the Great Recession, experiencing a backlog that took until 2018-19 to clear.

Throughout the last four years, the Office has made extensive changes to operations to effectively meet the challenge presented by the historic appeals workload. In addition to reassigning appraisers and forming three new dedicated appeals teams, the Office has repurposed existing teams in other divisions to increase support for appraisers, reassigned entire workloads, continuously adapted priorities and processes, and created new tools to better model and forecast workloads and manage staffing levels.

The Office has sent stipulated agreement letters offering temporary value reductions, where appropriate, to owners of properties that are simpler to value, such as condominiums and dwellings, resolving those appeals with minimal appraiser time to free up appraisers to process more complex cases. The Office has also led a joint effort with the Controller’s Office and the Assessment Appeals Board to build a new appeals scheduling model that better ensures Assessor staff are available for all scheduled hearings. The Assessment Appeals Board is an independent, local body overseen by the Clerk of the Board of Supervisors; the Appeals Board has exclusive authority over receiving and scheduling all assessment appeals.

“The Office of the Assessor-Recorder has treated this as the city-wide challenge that it is. By inviting collaboration and seeking new and better ways of working, Assessor Torres and his team have called attention to a vital part of city government,” said Greg Wagner, City Controller. “It was in no way guaranteed that the City would respond to the rise in assessment appeals as an opportunity to innovate and better serve both taxpayers and the City’s financial needs, and I’ve been proud to partner with Assessor-Recorder Torres in this work. There’s a lot of heavy lifting left to do, but, we’re stronger as a city thanks to the work that’s been happening and it’s good to see real progress now.”

Reassessment Backlog & Timeline

State law provides Assessors four years to process assessable events, recognizing that workloads can shift dramatically and rapidly with the economy, while adjusting appraiser staffing to match often takes far longer. During regular periods, the Office typically completes assessable events in one year or less. Delays in processing assessable events can lead to catch up assessments, which can complicate financial planning for taxpayers and potentially cause hardship if unplanned for.

While the Office completed more than 13,000 assessable events last fiscal year, 165% more than the prior year, it regularly receives 15,000 to 20,000 new assessable events annually. Its current timeline for most assessable events is approximately two years, and it is working hard to return to the pre-pandemic timeline of one year or less as soon as possible.

“Delays can create confusion and frustration. We want people to know we recognize that and are laser-focused on minimizing the impacts and eliminating the delays,” said Assessor-Recorder Joaquín Torres.

Transforming the Office
This work to transform the Office and the way it works with stakeholders coincides with significant technological upgrades that have improved the taxpayer experience as well as how the Office operates, including a brand new, modern assessment system, taxpayer portal, and a first-in-the-state new online records portal. These projects have made San Francisco’s Assessor-Recorder’s Office one of the most digitally accessible Assessor-Recorders in California.