Marion County's 2026 reassessment added roughly $2 billion of assessed value to about 1,000 apartment complexes with 20 or more units — we covered the what and why in our apartment assessment increase breakdown. This post is the next step: if you own one of those properties and the new number doesn't square with what the asset actually earns, the income approach is your strongest rebuttal, and the Form 130 deadline is June 15, 2026.
Here's why it works. Indiana assesses property at market value-in-use, but township assessors value apartment complexes through mass appraisal — cost tables, depreciation schedules, and neighborhood trending applied to thousands of parcels at once. Cost tables don't know your vacancy rate, your concession burden, or your deferred-maintenance reality. A properly built income analysis replaces the assessor's generalized model with the actual economics of your building, and Indiana appeal bodies treat the income approach as the most probative method for income-producing property. The catch: a sloppy income analysis is easy to dismantle. This guide covers how to build one that survives contact.
Warning
The Form 130 must be filed with the Marion County Assessor by June 15, 2026. The full income workup can follow at the informal conference and PTABOA hearing, but your opinion of value on the Form 130 should already be the output of this analysis — not a placeholder you hope to justify later.
Step 1: Assemble the rent roll
Start with a complete rent roll as close to the January 1, 2026 assessment date as possible — December 2025 or January 2026 is ideal. For each unit: unit type, square footage, contract rent, lease start/end, occupancy status, and any concessions (free months, reduced deposits, gift cards) amortized into effective rent.
Then build a trailing-12-month income statement (calendar 2025 works well since it brackets the assessment date). PTABOA panels and assessor representatives are rightly skeptical of a single month annualized — a December snapshot multiplied by 12 hides seasonality, concession timing, and turnover loss.
Step 2: Actual rent vs. market rent — know which one applies
This is the single most contested issue in Indiana multifamily appeals, so get ahead of it.
Because the standard is market value-in-use, the assessor will argue the income approach should use market rents, not your contract rents — otherwise a poorly managed building would be rewarded with a lower assessment than an identical well-managed one next door. That argument is legitimate, and pretending otherwise will cost you credibility.
The correct posture:
- If your rents are at or near market, this is a non-issue. Document it with a rent comparability grid — three to five competing complexes (same submarket, vintage, unit mix) with their advertised rents per square foot.
- If your rents are below market, explain why in property terms, not management terms: functional obsolescence (no in-unit laundry, dated mechanicals), location factors, or unit mix skewed toward less-demanded floor plans. Those are property characteristics that depress market rent for this asset, which is exactly what value-in-use should capture.
- If your rents are above market (rare in this cycle), use market — using actuals would overstate value, and you wouldn't be appealing anyway.
The strongest presentations show both columns — actual and market — and demonstrate that the indicated value is defensible under either.
Step 3: Vacancy and collection loss
Apply a vacancy and collection loss factor to gross potential rent. Use the greater of your actual stabilized experience or the submarket norm — again, the standard is what a market participant would expect from this asset, not your best or worst single year. Support the number with your trailing-12 occupancy history and a published submarket vacancy figure from a broker report (Cushman & Wakefield publishes Indianapolis MarketBeat reports quarterly). If your actual vacancy is well above submarket, document the cause — units offline for repair, fire damage, a down corridor — because chronic, property-driven vacancy is evidence; management-driven vacancy is not.
Include collection loss (skips, evictions, bad debt) as a separate line. Post-2020 collection loss in workforce-housing assets is real and routinely understated in assessor models.
Step 4: Operating expenses and the expense ratio
Build the expense stack from your actual trailing-12 financials, then normalize:
| Expense line | Include? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Management fee | Yes | Use a market rate even if self-managed |
| Repairs & maintenance | Yes | Normalize one-time spikes across years |
| Payroll | Yes | On-site staff only |
| Utilities (owner-paid) | Yes | Note any RUBS recovery as income |
| Insurance | Yes | Use current-cycle premiums — these have risen sharply |
| Replacement reserves | Yes | A per-unit reserve is standard appraisal practice |
| Property taxes | No — see cap rate loading below | Excluding them avoids circularity |
| Capital expenditures | No | Capital items belong in reserves, not opex |
| Debt service | No | Financing is not an operating expense |
| Depreciation | No | Non-cash accounting entry |
Expect the assessor's representative to challenge your expense ratio (total opex as a percent of effective gross income). If yours is materially above typical stabilized multifamily ratios, have a line-item explanation ready — insurance repricing, an older building's maintenance load, owner-paid utilities. A bare ratio with no support invites the assessor to substitute a lower "market" ratio and inflate your NOI.
The output of Steps 1–4 is net operating income: effective gross income minus normalized operating expenses, before taxes, debt, and capex.
Step 5: Cap rate selection — where appeals are won and lost
Value = NOI ÷ cap rate, so a 50-basis-point dispute over the cap rate moves the indicated value more than most expense arguments combined. Source your rate; never assert it.
Where to get Indianapolis cap rate data:
- CBRE's U.S. Cap Rate Survey — the H2 2025 edition is the closest published survey to the January 1, 2026 assessment date. CBRE's national multifamily surveys put average core going-in cap rates in the high-4s and value-add rates in the low-to-mid 5s as of late 2025, and CBRE's underwriting survey specifically flagged Indianapolis as one of the markets where cap rates rose quarter-over-quarter in Q4 2025 — useful evidence that a Midwest secondary market prices above those national averages.
- Broker market reports — Cushman & Wakefield, JLL, Marcus & Millichap, and Colliers all publish Indianapolis or Midwest multifamily reports with transaction-derived cap rates by class.
- Extracted rates from actual sales — the strongest evidence of all. If comparable Indianapolis complexes sold near the assessment date and you can document their NOI, the extracted cap rate from a real local transaction beats any survey.
Match the rate to the asset: Class B/C workforce housing in Indianapolis trades at meaningfully higher cap rates than new Class A downtown product. Citing a national core institutional rate for a 1978 garden complex in Wayne Township is the fastest way to lose the panel.
Load the cap rate for taxes. Because you excluded property taxes from expenses (Step 4), add the effective tax rate to your cap rate — this is the standard "loaded cap rate" technique that removes circularity (you can't deduct a tax expense that depends on the very value you're calculating). For a non-homestead property, the circuit breaker caps the effective rate at 2% of gross AV for residential rental property, so the load is roughly the lesser of your district's effective rate or 2.0 percentage points. Showing the panel that you loaded the rate correctly signals you know the methodology — and preempts the assessor's most technical objection.
Step 6: Convert NOI to value and reconcile
Divide stabilized NOI by the loaded cap rate, then reconcile against reality: does the indicated value per unit make sense against recent per-unit sale prices in your submarket? If you bought the property recently at arm's length, your purchase price is powerful evidence — and if your indicated value sits far below a recent purchase price, expect to explain why.
For smaller properties where expense data is thin, a gross rent multiplier analysis from comparable rental sales is an acceptable simpler alternative — but for 20+ unit assets in this reassessment cohort, do the full direct capitalization.
Step 7: Presenting it on Form 130 and at PTABOA
On the Form 130, enter the indicated value from your analysis as your opinion of value and cite "assessed value exceeds market value-in-use" as the ground. Attach a one-page summary of the income analysis even at filing — it frames every later conversation.
At the preliminary informal conference (typically 30–45 days after filing), bring the full package: rent roll, trailing-12 operating statement, rent comparability grid, expense normalization notes, cap rate sources, and the capitalization summary. A meaningful share of income-property appeals settle here when the workup is professional.
If you proceed to the PTABOA hearing, bring five copies of a tabbed binder and lead with a single page: gross potential rent → vacancy/collection → effective gross income → expenses → NOI → loaded cap rate → indicated value, with one supporting exhibit behind each line. Our PTABOA evidence guide covers the hearing mechanics; the escalation guide covers what happens if you need the Indiana Board of Tax Review.
Tip
Anticipate the assessor's three standard counterattacks: (1) "your actual rents are below market" — answer with the rent grid and property-based explanations; (2) "your expense ratio is inflated" — answer with line-item documentation; (3) "your cap rate is cherry-picked" — answer with multiple published sources plus an extracted local rate, properly tax-loaded. If you have a credible answer to all three before the hearing, you are ahead of most appellants.
The economics of bothering
A worked example: a 60-unit complex assessed at $6.0M whose income approach supports $5.0M. At the 2% rental cap, the $1M AV reduction is worth up to $20,000 per year — recurring, every year the lower value holds. And filing by June 15 also engages the appeal-payment protection rules while the appeal is pending.
Pull your property record card and current assessment through Property Lookup, run the numbers this week, and file with a value you can defend line by line.