We’ve posted before how efficiently and frequently the staff at city hall are able to issue mid construction re-assessments. Or how adept they are at assessing newly built infill housing at the pinnacle of retail value, like a housewarming gift from city hall to maxed out first time homeowners. Our case study today suggests that assessment algorithm could use a little tweak. My proposition is the tax crew start to mine the publicly available data for those who know the property best - current sellers. Once listed on the mls, these homes reflect the truest value and condition of the property. So lets incorporate that into the tax assessment system and use it as a technique to raise appropriate funds for running the big blue machine downtown.
Much of the errors in current tax practice seem to really benefit the boomer group - the kind that bought cheap and has been comfortably housed for decades, vs the maxed out millenial sneaking into a townhouse or semi detached, or renting. Under taxed property are typically large lots in prime areas, often drastically under assessed. City hall is leaving huge sums on the table, catering to the anti development core group that expect the planning department to mandate scarcity and preserve restrictive land use, while decrying investors as exploitive opportunists harming neighbourhood character. When it comes time to sell, this group shows it has been using the family home as a tax sheltered investment vehicle all along, with mind altering perception of their old home value.
Some of these tax histories appear to even show no tax increase since 2020, despite the massive societal inflation in hard assets and currency devaluation. In real dollars, this example seems to show the tax applied has actually gone down over the last decade.
Why does city hall not review this information and issue a special assessment based on the owners self declaration of value and the one million dollar difference between that and the 2024 final tally? If it can reassess a construction project quarterly, while it is vacant and has no resident using services, surely this is an easier and softer target for raising revenue? Won’t it be a little tricky for an outraged home owner to appeal his assessment when he had just independently valued it in the most public way possible?
