“ANYONE EXPECTING THEIR PROPERTY TAX BILL TO FALL BECAUSE A DATA CENTER OPENED NEARBY SHOULD NOT COUNT ON IT”

- Realtor.com study, August 2026

The constant refrain from the pro-data center crowd is that it will lower property taxes - maybe even eliminate them! But the problem is that the data does not back that up. Take the study quoted above, for example.

This Realtor.com study was linked on Compass Datacenters’ Topeka/Shawnee County site page where they have a frequently asked questions section. They were using the study to claim that house values near a data center aren’t adversely affected. But later on, that study also says this:

“Property tax rates near large data centers ease at opening, then rise above baseline”

So, according to this study, property tax not only doesn’t go down near data centers, it often rebounds to higher levels than it was at previously. Huh.

Maybe Compass didn’t bother to read the entire study. Let’s thank them for their lack of due diligence that gave us this gem:

“The practical upshot: anyone expecting their property tax bill to fall because a data center opened nearby should not count on it. The evidence of a direct homeowner tax benefit is weak, and the causal chain between a data center’s presence and a neighbor’s tax rate has too many missing links to draw firm conclusions from this data alone.”

Check it out for yourselves: https://www.realtor.com/research/august-2026-data-centers