Delaware

Delaware has just been through its first property reassessment in forty years, and it changed the arithmetic under every property in the state.

Sussex County had not reassessed since 1974, New Castle since 1983 and Kent since 1987, until a 2018 education-funding lawsuit brought by Delawareans for Educational Opportunity and the NAACP led the Court of Chancery to rule in 2020 that the old values violated the state’s uniformity requirement and order all three counties to reassess.

The new values landed between 2024 and 2025, some of them several hundred per cent above the figures they replaced.

The General Assembly has since passed relief legislation and required reassessment every five years, so the long freeze that made Delaware’s tax bills predictable is gone for good, and an owner deciding what a property is worth holding can no longer assume last decade’s bill.

Foreclosure here is judicial and nothing else, and it runs by writ of scire facias, an old procedure in which the lender files in Superior Court and the homeowner is summoned to show cause why the property should not be sold.

The sale is a sheriff’s sale, the court must confirm it afterwards, and the owner can redeem at any point up to that confirmation but not once it is granted.

Delaware is a small state with old housing: Wilmington and the river towns hold nineteenth-century stock, and Sussex County is farm and poultry ground where the same acreage has often been in one family for generations.

Most Delaware sellers are deciding what to do about an old house, a parcel that has been in the family a long time, and an assessment that has just moved for the first time in their adult lives.