The Unlikely Workforce That Could Help Fix America’s Property Tax System

More than 4,000 completed homes remain missing from the property tax rolls in Montgomery County, TX—and that's progress.

The backlog once stood at roughly 12,000 properties. Just last year, the Montgomery Central Appraisal District added 5,052 previously missed homes to the rolls, restoring approximately $1.5 billion in taxable value, Deputy Chief Appraiser Jacob Martinez told county commissioners this month.

But the district is still trying to catch up as subdivisions spread north of Houston and thousands of parcels are created each year. To close the gap and stay on top of the more than 121,000 protests they've received so far this year, officials say they need more staff.

“Bodies are needed,” Martinez said. In all, the district requested 18 new positions, including 14 appraisers.

Montgomery County is far from alone in its need. Municipal surveys, government audits, and budget requests from across the country describe assessor offices struggling to recruit and retain the specialized workers responsible for maintaining the property tax rolls.

But Lars Doucet says a solution might be hiding in plain sight. Doucet is a co-founder of the Center for Land Economics, where he builds tools for assessor offices and works directly with the officials responsible for maintaining tax rolls.

It's something of a second act for him—a career he arrived at after spending 15 years developing video games. Now, he's trying to make that pathway a trend.

As assessor offices struggle to recruit workers with programming, data, and mapping skills, game studios are laying off thousands of people who already possess them.

Doucet’s proposal is straightforward: Recruit them.

The workers behind every valuation, protest, and property tax bill

It's hard to understate the scale or the consequences of the assessor labor shortage.

In Los Angeles County, a shortage of qualified employees contributed to a backlog of nearly 110,000 permits, ownership transfers, and Proposition 19 claims, according to the Assessor’s Office’s 2025–26 budget request.

The office estimated that approximately $27 billion in property value was awaiting processing. Under existing staffing levels, it projected that $11 billion to $13 billion could remain off the annual assessment roll, deferring roughly $120 million in property tax revenue.

“This backlog defers an estimated $120 million in property tax revenue, impacting public safety, education, infrastructure, and social services,” the budget reads. “Immediate investment in staffing and resources is critical to prevent further financial strain.”

That fiscal effect can extend to homeowners, too. In jurisdictions where local governments determine how much money they need and divide that levy across the tax base, missing or undervalued property can leave correctly assessed owners carrying more of the burden.

In Cook County, IL, a joint investigation by the Illinois Answers Project and the Chicago Tribune found hundreds of properties that had been missed or misclassified, including homes recorded as vacant land. The errors omitted roughly $444 million in taxable value in a single year.

And while assessors are sometimes vilified because of their connection to property tax bills, these public records tell a very different story: Some of the pain homeowners experience may stem not from the work assessors do, but from there being too few of them to do it.

The 'accidental profession'

No federal agency or national professional organization appears to track how many assessor positions are vacant nationwide, but the hiring obstacles are well documented.

Assessment requires an unusual combination of real estate valuation, tax law, data analysis, field inspection, mapping, and public administration. Depending on the state, employees may also need coursework, supervised experience, and professional certification before they can work independently.

A 2024 survey of 39 Connecticut municipalities ranked assessor among the hardest local government positions to fill. Nearly 89% of respondents said a lack of interest in municipal employment contributed to their recruitment problems. Towns also cited credentialing requirements and a shortage of qualified applicants.

Compensation can narrow the pool further. The International Association of Assessing Officers has warned that assessment jobs are often included in broad municipal salary studies that fail to account for their technical demands. The organization identifies recruitment, retention, and succession planning for an aging workforce among the profession’s central operational challenges.

Doucet believes the shortage begins with an even more basic problem: Most people do not know the career exists.

“There is no pipeline to become an assessor,” he says.

Within the industry, assessment is sometimes called “the accidental profession.” Workers often arrive through an adjacent government job, a family connection, or a series of circumstances rather than through a clear educational or career track.

“Nobody says, ‘Mommy and Daddy, I want to be a municipal property tax assessor when I grow up,'” Doucet says.

That dependence on accidental recruitment has become more consequential as experienced employees retire. New workers may be entering, but not quickly enough to replace the knowledge leaving with the older generation.

What 2 additional appraisers can do

California's Santa Cruz County offers evidence that rebuilding an assessment workforce can produce measurable results.

Its assessor’s office had faced years of backlogs following COVID-19 pandemic-era layoffs, the CZU Lightning Complex fires, winter storms, and the implementation of Proposition 19.

After the office added two appraisal employees, it made meaningful progress reducing those backlogs, Assessor-Recorder Sheri Thomas wrote in the county’s most recent annual report.

“With recent staff additions, we have made significant progress in reducing these backlogs, directly contributing to a 2025–26 roll growth of nearly 6%, well above the projected 4%,” she wrote.

And yet, filling vacancies remains difficult. Local governments must authorize the positions, find candidates, and train them while existing employees are already carrying out unfinished work.

Los Angeles County sought 20 new roll-production positions and one data scientist while citing attrition, lost expertise, gaps in knowledge transfer, and a limited pipeline of new professionals.

For Doucet, that request is also evidence that assessor offices do not need only traditional field appraisers. They need programmers, data scientists, mapping specialists, and other technical workers who can improve the systems behind the roll—and allow appraisers to spend more time inspecting properties, completing valuations, and handling appeals.

The talent leaving the game industry

More than one-third of U.S. video-game workers surveyed for the Game Developers Conference’s 2026 industry report said they had been laid off within the previous two years. Across all countries, 28% reported experiencing a layoff, while nearly half of those workers had not found another job.

Doucet is careful not to characterize game developers moving into assessment offices as an established trend. Instead, “I’m trying to make it a trend,” he says.

He argues that the overlap between the professions is stronger than their job titles suggest.

Game developers routinely construct two- and three-dimensional environments, work with coordinate systems, manipulate large datasets, and build software that must process information quickly. Assessment offices rely on many of the same capabilities to map parcels, model property values, identify missing construction, and test whether comparable homes are being assessed consistently.

“You’re used to coordinating that with programming,” Doucet explains. “How about now you coordinate two dimensions, and it doesn’t have to run at 60 frames per second?”

Municipal work likely doesn't offer the compensation of the most lucrative technology jobs, he acknowledges. But it can offer benefits, stability, and employment outside the small number of expensive metropolitan areas where many game studios are concentrated.

And Doucet has seen the transition work even beyond his own career trajectory.

A former colleague with experience in game development had been laid off and needed a job. Doucet invited him to an International Association of Assessing Officers conference, where he was presenting.

Officials from a Florida property appraiser’s office approached Doucet afterward to discuss his valuation software. Doucet told them he was already employed, but introduced his former colleague.

The office hired him within weeks, and today, "he's killing it," Doucet says.

It is just one example of the larger payoff Doucet sees in recruiting from the game industry. Programmers, data analysts, and mapping specialists could help modernize a profession under immense pressure from nearly all angles.

Mapping is among the clearest examples, he says. Plotting property values on a map can help homeowners, elected officials, and assessment staff see whether comparable homes on the same block are being treated consistently, whether a new subdivision has been added to the roll, and whether assessment patterns shift across neighborhoods.

In Doucet's words, "That makes property taxes less scary."