What it Means When Your Assessed Value is Not Equal to Your Property Value

Why doesn’t the assessed value of my home equal its market value?You may have noticed that the “market value” of your home, or even the price you recently paid for it, differs from the value assigned to it by BC Assessment -in some cases by a wide margin. How could this be? Isn’t there only one true value of your home? As it turns out, for a number of reasons that we will outline here, there isn’t. Assessed vs. market valueBC Assessment is the provincial crown corporation whose mandate, under the Assessment Act, is to assign values to all properties in British Columbia on July 1st each year. BC Assessment produces assessment data to provide tax authorities with a tax base and other information about properties. In valuing a property, BC Assessment considers its unique traits such as size, layout, age, condition, and location, along with recent sales in the local neighbourhood. The assessed value of a property remains fixed for 12 months (until it is assessed once again). In contrast, t...