The Experts at Ryan Realize More Savings for Datacenters

Approximately 70% of the world’s internet traffic flows through Northern Virginia. Loudoun County, Virginia, has built a tremendous concentration of datacenters that serve both co-location and enterprise users. Over the past few years, taxing authorities across Northern Virginia, including Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William counties, have adopted aggressive valuation strategies for both real and personal property taxation of all the different types of datacenters located in their jurisdictions.

In 2022, Robert Fey, a well-respected datacenter expert and one of the architects of the government’s strategy for the taxation of datacenters in Northern Virginia, joined Ryan’s Arlington office as a Senior Manager. Since joining our local experts, Robert has obtained significant reductions for datacenter clients, applying his thorough understanding of the government’s valuation methodologies and assumptions, as well as the underlying flaws therein.

For example, Ryan had pending real property tax appeals in Loudoun County on behalf of three leading datacenter operators. Mr. Fey was able to resolve them all, resulting in more than $500 million in reduced assessed values and tax savings of more than $7 million for these clients. Ryan has many other pending datacenter appeals in Northern Virginia, and we expect to receive significant reductions pursuant to the approach taken by Robert Fey and supported by Ryan’s other datacenter experts, Principals Michael Allen, Mark LoRusso, and Jeff Tuthill.

Ryan has developed and is now applying industry-leading valuation techniques and thought leadership to ensure our clients pay no more than their fair share of both real and personal property taxes associated with their datacenter properties. The Ryan datacenter team is actively pursuing appeals of both co-location and enterprise datacenters throughout Northern Virginia and the rest of the country. If you own, operate, manage or lease a datacenter in the U.S. or Europe, please contact us.