Real estate tax: the new reality for shopping centres, logistics or office properties

The extended deadline for submitting real estate tax returns expired on 31 March 2025. Below, we highlight the issues for each type of commercial property that were most frequently identified by MDDP experts.

How have the new regulations affected the taxation of shopping centres?

No longer excluded from taxation are the so-called small architectural objects, but rather garden architecture objects and objects used for recreation and maintenance, i.e. various types of small items such as:

• shopping trolley shelters,
• bin shelters or
• flagpoles

and others need to be re-evaluated in terms of current definitions.

Owners of shopping centres should also be careful when classifying the technical equipment serving the building, e.g. transformer stations, air conditioning units or wastewater treatment facilities, which may potentially be subject to tax even if they are installed inside the building.

What should owners of logistics centres pay attention to?

In the case of logistics centres, it is quite common that the taxable structures are not precisely identified. The reason for this is that the expenditure on the building infrastructure is recorded in the accounts together with the building as a single fixed asset. This approach is permitted from an accounting perspective, but it makes it difficult for taxpayers to determine what structures they have and what value of the structures to report for tax purposes.

In the described situation, a site visit combined with verification of accounting documentation will be helpful. This will answer the question of whether the value of the structures previously reported for taxation includes expenditure on, among other things, a water storage tank, fencing or elements of the utilities networks.

A separate issue is the classification of various types of mezzanines and storage platforms, which will not always be subject to taxation. This depends, among other things, on their construction and the process of their creation.

Do the changes in regulations matter for office properties?

After the change in the definition of a structure, office property owners and facility managers were concerned about the taxation of passenger lifts. For the purposes of property tax, lift shafts alone are not considered as usable space, which means that these parts of the building are excluded from taxation. However, entrepreneurs’ doubts concern not so much lift shafts as the technical equipment of passenger lifts.

The source of these concerns is the ambiguity of the statutory definition of a structure in the part concerning the so-called building facilities, which includes, among others, technical devices directly related to the building and necessary for its use according to its intended purpose.

Please note that there is a higher risk of being classified as a structure for technical equipment other than passenger lifts. For office properties, this can include equipment for cleaning or collecting waste water and air vents from underground car parks.

Regardless of the qualification of the technical device itself, foundations and other construction parts of such devices are also subject to taxation as structures.