Dr Moore wrote: ↑Mon Nov 08, 2021 5:25 pm
I've been curiously reading this linked page. Thanks for sharing it, Simon.
The page is dense and rather difficult to parse. On one hand, so much information must have taken a lot of effort to find.
But it's hard to understand how Scott makes the leap to claiming such large numbers in real estate holdings.
Many land holdings are listed, but without a clear summary of what's owned and what's leased. And none of the land holdings are given a dollar value. So despite all of the listed properties, it all seems to boil down to two inputs which are not attributed:
First, this:
Scott Bidstrup wrote:Some years ago, the Salt Lake Tribune sent some reporters around to poke through the public records in the County Recorder's offices scattered around the state of Utah, carefully recording land and real property owned by entities known to be church-owned corporations in each county. When the results were tallied up, the total assessed taxable value was $110 billion - about 11% of the assessed taxable property value of the entire state of Utah.
Then, this:
The church's apostles have often said that the church owns more real estate outside of Utah than inside.
With these two statements, Scott jumps to the conclusion that the church must own "$220 billion, absolute minimum" in real estate, not held in Ensign Peak. Not to question Scott's research, but it feels a bit hand wavy at the end of the day, because his huge headline numbers of greater than $220Bn in real estate holdings is ultimately based on two uncited, and candidly, questionable, if not made up, sources.
There's no doubt the church owns a lot of land. But how much is that land worth, really? I find Scott's presentation unconvincing in terms of justifying the claimed asset values.
Another point, missed by most assessments, is that temples and chapels may have cost a certain amount of money, but are in fact worth only slightly less than the market value of the land they sit on, because that's what a buyer will pay for the land, discounting the cost of demolition. The buildings have no value to the market, only to the church.
In the end, I think it makes more sense to be conservative and careful in these analyses. Because over-estimation of church assets and holdings ends up grounding bad feelings in poor data.