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Florence, Omaha: The City's Oldest Homes and Their Taxes

FairAppeal Editorial Team · May 28, 2026 · 3 min read

Florence is the oldest part of Omaha, full of 1800s homes a countywide valuation model misreads. Why those assessments run high, and what a protest does.

Florence homes get overassessed because many of the city's oldest houses predate the sales the county's annual valuation leans on. A Florence property can carry a 2026 value above what it would actually sell for, and that gap repeats until someone challenges it.

What makes Florence the oldest part of Omaha?

Florence was settled in 1854 on the site of the Mormon Winter Quarters, where more than two thousand people camped on the way west in the 1840s. The 1856 Bank of Florence, a Greek Revival building on North 30th, is one of the oldest commercial buildings in Nebraska and now a museum. Walk a few blocks and you pass preserved Victorian homes like the Lantry-Thompson Mansion near 36th and State, on streets that have changed little in a century. The houses here are genuinely old, and that is the whole problem for a valuation model.

Florence, Omaha

Look up if you are overpaying on your Florence, Omaha home.

Why can a Florence assessment land too high?

A countywide reassessment values more than 175,000 homes at once, leaning on recent sales and broad neighborhood patterns. Florence breaks the pattern: its housing is older and more varied than the model assumes, so it can read a modest historic home as worth more than the market would pay. When that happens the assessment runs high, and the owner carries the extra tax every year until the value is challenged. At Omaha-metro rates near 1.7 percent of market value, even a modest overstatement quietly adds up, every year the value holds.

What can a Florence homeowner do about it?

Nebraska mails valuation notices by June 1, and a Florence owner has until June 30 to file. An independent referee reviews it and the Board of Equalization decides by early August, with no county filing fee. A Fair Appeal review is free, and FairAppeal handles the full property tax appeal on the owner's behalf; the fee, when it applies, is a percentage of first-year tax savings.

Related reading: the full Douglas County protest guide and the Douglas County protest deadline.