Who will fill up the 1.5 million square feet of office space that will soon be available in downtown? That’s a question a lot of people are asking. Wellmark Blue Cross Blue Shield’s headquarters development is moving right along and so is Aviva’s new headquarters out in West Des Moines. We just got the huge new Davis Brown Tower and along with it, their previously vacated office space in the Financial Center.

According to some, this huge space vacancy may affect not only income to downtown property owners but also could raise taxes for homeowners and cut revenue for city services as well as Des Moines Public Schools because more vacancy means decreased commercial property values as well as local condo residents’ home values.

Right now Des Moines receives about $140 million in taxes coming from commercial property owners. If the vacated space is not re-leased soon, that’s a huge impact to our local economy. Right now before these big moves, there’s already an awful lot of empty retail space through out the skywalk, the whole bottom floor of the Bank of America Building, most of buildings along Locust Street between 7th and 6th and in particularly along where I live, the Liberty Building has floors 4, 5, 6, and 7 empty and the Des Moines Building across the street is mostly empty. Didn’t the city or county need new office space or courthouse space? I just don’t get why they don’t lease up some of this space.

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Posted under Living Downtown
Tags: Taxes

One of the biggest incentives for people to move downtown are the tax abatements that the City of Des Moines is offering to lure people down here. I know it was a huge factor in my decision! I would be saving about $465 a month and that’s almost the size of car payment. The building I picked to live in, the Liberty Building, touted 10 year tax abatement on their brochures as well as a number of other condo projects that I looked at. No property taxes for 10 years, what an awesome deal, for me over the course of 10 years that’s a savings of almost $56,000. I was so tickled that I didn’t dig into what a 10 year tax abatement truly mean for me. So I hope this post may help future downtown buyers avoid the shock that I received the day I went to file for my tax abatement.

I went downtown to the City of Des Moines Permit & Development Center to file for the tax abatement, and started talking with the clerk. (Here’s where the surprise came.) I closed on my condo on March 3rd, 2008 but the deadline for tax year is February 1st, so even though I was filing now nothing would even be processed until sometime next February 2009 and I would see no tax abatement until September 1st 2009, a whole 18 months of taxes later. So to get the 10 years worth of abatement for myself, I would have to live there for 11 years and 8 months. I will have to pay almost $10,000 until then.

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Posted under Living Downtown
Tags: Liberty Condos | Taxes