There are just 7 days left in which to appeal your 2016 property tax assessment … or forever hold your peace. The Property Valuation Services Corporation (PVSC), the municipally controlled body responsible for tax assessment throughout the province, mailed out your Assessment Notice on January 8th. The appeal period ends at midnight on February 8th. If you have enrolled your property in our PAMS™ Property Tax Manager program, PVSC have already sent us an electronic copy of your Assessment Notice enabling us to review your assessment and file an appeal if the opportunity exists to reduce your tax burden. If you do not have PAMS™ protection, and have not yet asked us to review your Assessment Notice, you should do so now. The 2016 increase experienced by many property types is lower than that of years past, however the decision to appeal/not appeal should never be based solely on a single years change in value. Most property types are assessed 25% to 30% higher than five years ago. You should be vigilant in your efforts to manage your tax load and take every opportunity to minimise your assessment.

The basis for your Year 2016 assessed value is your property’s Market Value on 1st January 2014 (the “base date”) but having regard to its physical state on 1st December 2015 (the “state date”). In practice these criteria are oft stated by PVSC in defence of its assessed values, but in our experience property is often assessed at less than its market value perhaps because supporting sales data is not available, or to discourage appeals. (There may be legitimate reasons too for assessing a property below its base date sales price; for example, if the property had lost a major tenant by the state date). Of course it would not matter if all property were under-assessed by the same percentage amount, but such is not the case. Fortunately the Assessment Act does provide protection against such shenanigans by including a requirement that all properties in the municipality be assessed in a uniform manner. Case law has determined that uniformity is achieved by calculating the “General Level of Assessment” within the municipality, by property category (commercial or residential). The General Level of Assessment is the ratio of the 2016 assessment to the property’s 1st January 2014 Market Value. This can only be achieved by totalling all of the 2016 assessments, for those properties whose sales occurred between 1 st July 2013 and 30th June 2014, with the aggregate of their sale prices. Sales data is now publicly available; however, its format and accessibility is fairly limited. PVSC usually insist that their General Level of Assessment is 95% to 100%. This is rubbish: base your calculations on 80% and file an appeal if the assessed value of your commercial, industrial or investment property > 80% x Market Value (@ 1st January 2014). Exclude the HST from the market value. (We have built an information technology platform Compuval™, and have populated it with sales, assessment and rental information. It allows us to calculate Market Values and gives us a broad indication of the true General Level of Assessment. The quantity of sales data varies by municipality since we gather it from multiple sources, so we have built capability into CompuVal® to run a variety of analyses comparing your property with others in its peer group).

The Bottom Line: If your Realty Assessment > [(Market Value as of 1st January 2014) x (General Level of Assessment)], you are over-assessed. The real General Level of Assessment is probably between 0.8 and 0.9 in most municipalities.

Action Required: If in doubt, appeal … or contact our Nova Scotia Tax Team, Mark Turner, Giselle Kakamousias or Greg Kerry at 1-800-567-3033 (429-1811 in HRM).