Within the next few days owners of more than 500,000 residences in Greater Vancouver will be receiving their 2016 Annual BC Property Assessments in the mail. These assessments will reflect property values as July 1, 2015.
What are property assessments and why are they important? Well, property assessments is an estimated value of your house or a condo by a government agency – BC Assessments. Based on this calculated value the annual property taxes are paid. The higher the BC Assessments value is, the higher annual property taxes are.
There is another important function BC Assessments serve – determining property’s value. Often times when the listing agent tries to determine a listing price of a property he or she will take BC Assessments value into the consideration (not always as each agent has a different way of determining a listing price). Other times potential buyers will look to BC Assessments or Tax value and try to determine a fair price for a property (that seems not to apply to a current real estate market).
What can owners expect to see this year in their property BC Assessments? Based on the released BC Assessment for this year an increase of 15-20 percent will be typical for a single-family homes in Vancouver, North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Burnaby, Tri-Cities, New Westminster and Squamish (See chart below of a complete breakdown). Don’t be surprised if your home BC Assessments value comes with an increase of 25%.
Overall, Greater Vancouver’s region total assessments increased from $546.7 billion in 2015 to $636.2 billion in 2016. A total increase of about 16% in one year. Almost $8.3 billion of that increase is due to new construction, subdivision and reasoning of properties. Take a drive down Cambie Street and you can witness rezoning of properties working at its finest.
All of this is good news for homeowners who are planning to sell their properties in a near future. However, many homeowners who were not planning to sell this year might be forced to do so because of the high property taxes. At least their properties have gone up in value.
If you are a property owner and need more information or have additional questions you can visit www.bcassessment.ca website for all of that.
Here is an example table showing some of the increases for single-family homes and residential strata units for sample Greater Vancouver communities.
What do you think about the increase of BC Assessments? Leave your comments below.