Take care with MPAC appeals
By Al Dharsee
The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) recently begun mailing out their 2005 Current Value Assessments (CVAs) to all property owners in Ontario. They hope to have all the CVAs mailed out before the end of November 2005.
Local municipalities will then apply their municipal tax rate percentages to these CVAs to determine the property taxes you will have to pay for the year 2006, early next year after finalizing their 2006 budgets.
The CVAs are MPAC’s estimate of your property’s market value as of January 1, 2005. For residential homes, the value is determined by a mass appraisal method that estimates the property value based on sales of homes in the vicinity.
Adjustments are made for lot size, quality of finish, finished basements, number of bathrooms, proximity to super mailboxes, busy roads, etc.
This mass appraisal is not always accurate, and many homes are over-assessed. If your assessment appears to be too high, you can ask for a reconsideration, and if no response is received by March 2006, you should file an appeal with the Assessment Review Board (ARB) to protect yourself. Requests for Reconsideration are available on MPAC’s website; http://www.mpac.ca. Appeals can be filed online on the ARB’s website; http://www.arb.gov.on.ca.
In both cases, you will have to prepare your own study showing why you believe your home is over-assessed.
All property owners are entitled to receive a study from MPAC showing the information they have on your home as well as least six other homes in the vicinity.
Property owners can also call MPAC at 1-866-296-6722 to obtain a password and user ID in order to obtain information on a maximum six other properties from their website. Without a study similar to the above, you will fail to convince either the MPAC assessor or the ARB Tribunal that your assessment should be reduced. I have seen numerous property owners appear at ARB Tribunal hearings and argue that their property assessment should be reduced because of anecdotal evidence of bigger homes in the general neighbourhood paying less taxes, or homes with finished basements paying less, but lose because they did not prepare a study to assist the Tribunal in arriving at a favorable decision.
Most property tax consultants will complete CVA studies and appear before the ARB for you in exchange for a percentage (normally 50 per cent) of the actual tax reduction.
(Al Dharsee, P.Eng. is a property tax consultant with Applecreek Consultants Ltd. in Markham, Ont.)
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