Property Assessment... the good, the bad, the ugly

So BC home-owners got their property assessments in the mail this week. For the most part, everyone who lives in BC saw their land/housing values increase substantially. In BC as a whole, the average increase in value was 23%. According to the Vancouver Sun:

"A record amount of new construction and the sixth year of a hot real estate market pushed the value of British Columbia real estate to $808 billion, according to BC Assessment's 2007 property roll."

But that's only the half of it... in the Okanagan Valley, the increase is pretty much the same:

"A typical single family home that was assessed at $356,000 in the summer of 2005 was assessed at $436,000 in the summer of 2006, up more than 22%."

So you'd think that our property assessment would have increased accordingly, yes? NOPE! Our property assessment came back with... get this... an 82.7% increase!!! Crap! I mean, the good thing is that our house is of greater value and if/when we do sell, we'll make a pretty penny off of it. The bad part is that our property taxes will undoubtedly go up this year - we must have gotten quite the sweet deal last year! And the ugly part is that they're projecting that the property assessments will only continue to increase... perhaps not up to the 22% we saw this year, but the market keeps going and going... meaning if we wanted to move, we'd just have to pay more for our new house anyway.

SO ya... the good, bad and ugly of property assessment statements. Time to start saving for tax season in July.