Why the board declined 2025 and 2026

Not because the complaint failed. Because ordering a reassessment on bad data would produce a bad reassessment.

"The board believes it would be ill advised to order the Town to perform a reassessment for the 2025 or 2026 tax years given the previously discussed concerns regarding the physical data for CI properties" — allowing time for data cleanup and a computer-assisted mass appraisal software conversion "is more likely to result in a more equitable and proportional reassessment." The findings rest on the RSA 71-B:16-a criteria.

Two corrections to how this has been summarized

There is no May 2026 reassessment-plan filing date. What the order actually requires is ongoing reporting: "The Town shall notify the board in writing, beginning July 1, 2026 and every three (3) months thereafter, of the status and progress of the reassessment," plus forwarding its Department of Revenue Administration-approved assessing contract. The Town's reassessment plan was already before the board when the order issued.

The file is not closed. The board retains jurisdiction "until it determines the 2027 reassessment is completed satisfactorily." This is an ongoing supervision order, not a one-off ruling.

What commercial assessment ratios mean for a condominium or HOA owner

Because the burden is zero-sum. A town's tax rate is set to raise a required amount from the total assessed base. If one class of property is systematically under-assessed, every other class pays the difference.

Conway put numbers on it: commercial properties assessed at 77 percent of what their subsequent sales indicated, while residential property sat much closer to full value. The petitioners projected a shift of roughly $1.25 million onto residential taxpayers, and a considerably larger figure if left uncorrected.

For an owner in a New Hampshire common-interest community, that is money leaving through the tax bill for reasons that have nothing to do with the association's budget and cannot be addressed by an individual abatement — because the individual assessment may be perfectly accurate. The problem is the other class.

Two different remedies, and boards confuse them

The abatement, under RSA 76:16, is the per-property remedy: your assessment is too high relative to market value or to comparable properties. It is due March 1, each owner files their own, and it produces a refund.

The RSA 71-B:16, IV petition, which is what Conway was, challenges the revaluation itself as inequitable across classes. Conway shows it is a live route and that it can succeed on statistical evidence — but the remedy is prospective correction, not money back. The petitioners got a 2027 reassessment, not a refund for 2023.

An association weighing whether to organize around a town-wide challenge should understand it is choosing the slower remedy that fixes the future.

The structural constraint the board named

The order documents a statewide assessor shortage the board treats as a real limit on what it can order. It cites its own companion matter, In re: Town of Colebrook, Docket No. 30970-24RA, where the board certified its order to the Department of Revenue Administration because the town could not comply, and DRA reported having "less than a dozen staff members to cover the entirety of the State."

That is worth knowing before an association invests in a challenge: the board can find a revaluation defective and still be constrained in what it can require, and when.

What to watch next

Conway's quarterly status reports, which began July 1, 2026, and the 2027 reassessment itself. Meanwhile revaluations elsewhere in New Hampshire are producing the same class-shift pattern — Rochester's produced average increases of 94 percent for condominiums and 208 percent for manufactured homes; Concord's 2026 revaluation put both above the citywide median.