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A New New Year Resolution: Challenge Your Property Tax Assessment
It’s official: 2014 is in full swing. You’re likely in the thick of trying to tackle and stay true to all the New Year resolutions you have committed to. While we all want to better ourselves personally with self-improvement goals, the truth is that many of those resolutions revolve around finances. When you think about it, what better way to improve yourself then with some peace of mind that you can keep more money in your pockets.
So amidst your new year duties to yourself to stick to your budget, manage your debt, pay off your mortgage, and save for retirement, BankRate suggests adding challenging your property tax assessment to the mix.
The real estate market is a volatile one. The economics of supply and demand, changing demographics, trends in desired localities, or types of housing are just some of the factors that influence its wax and wane. Property value is heavily influenced by these trends as opposed to more stable, definitive inclinations like the actual location or condition of your home. Whereas the condition of your home is relatively constant, and certainly is its physical location, the heterogeneity of homes means every unit of real estate is unique. Unfortunately though, local governments do not have the time or resources to personally evaluate properties as regularly as the combination of these aforementioned factors influence them. The government assigns values to properties in different jurisdictions every couple of years, when in reality, jurisdictions are constantly in flux in terms of these ephemeral values. This creates a possible discord between the predicted value and actual value of your home. This means you could be paying far more than you have to, because your property has been valued beyond its worth.
Take a look at your property tax to see if it has been building up.
Many houses are assessed and appointed the tax value in the market peak. Drawing back to our previous post on Canadian Real Estate and Mortgage trends in 2014, the average price of a home is only expected to increase marginally, so your home may be overestimated from a previous peak.
So how do you go about doing it? Investopedia and The Financial Post both offer their advice on the steps you can take. Here in Ottawa, the cost to appeal your property tax assessment is only $30. You have nothing to lose, as it is very rare that an appeal should lead to an increase in your property tax.
Steps to challenging your property tax.
Torontonian Sean Cooper was able to decrease the assessment value on his property by $74, 000 on his Scarborough home which he purchased at $425, 000. Let me help you refinance your property with our team of professionals at Verico Capital Mortgages, and see what we can achieve.
While it may be a commitment of time and effort to challenge your property tax assessment, the potential you have to gain could be worthwhile. If you follow through with this oft-overlooked initiative, it could just help you out with your other New Years resolutions by giving you an extra chunk of change to put towards paying off your mortgage… or towards buying a gym membership.
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