Friday, January 6, 2012

2012 Property Assessment Notice: Grade C-

It's that time of the year. The time where people opened a magical letter sent by BC Assessment and felt richer after they found out that their property value has increased (normally between 7 - 15% depending on the area).

When we received ours, we didn't feel that way. We were in the opposite end because our property value dropped by almost $70,000.00. It was too significant that made my blood pressure rise to the roof.

Because of the drop, we were curious to find out the property value around us. Thankfully, BC Assessment has made all prices accessible via their eValueBC online system.


After querying the system here and there, we learned that the overall strata price has dropped as well. Wife and I had a few entertaining/for fun theories as to why:
  • Bribery: to lower down the price around here so developer can purchase the land and build condo?
  • There are 2 new Strata Townhouse (one of them has 15 units, the other have a few more) being built in recent years; competitive market, increase in supply.
We decided to dig up all of the previous Property Assessment Notices to compare the property value since we moved in back then in 2005. We came up with the following table:

Increase Per-Year
Year Land Building Increase
2005 +$0 +$0 +$0
2006 +$21,000.00 -$2,000.00 +$19,000.00
2007 +$66,000.00 -$1,000.00 +$65,000.00
2008 +$2,000.00 -$2,000.00 +$0.00
2009 +$0.00 +$0.00 +$0.00
2010 -$22,000.00 +$45,000.00 +$23,000.00
2011 +$109,000.00 -$2,000.00 +$107,000.00
2012 -$62,000.00 -$7,000.00 -$69,000.00

That is one wild table if I may say. Hardcore roller coaster. We looked at those numbers and assumed that between 2010 to 2011, the market was at its peak and now it has cooled down and hover around "acceptable" price.

But then we probably know by now why the data looks like that. Vancouver is probably the most volatile city when it comes to housing price. The Globe and Mail published an article with a title of What's driving Vancouver house prices? back in June 2011.

The price may goes up again next year but probably will not be as high as before, which is probably a good thing. But it's still hurt to see money gone (^_^).

By the way, when we were fishing information in eValueBC, we found something interesting:


Someone bought a townhouse at $611,000 and now it is worth $501,000. Ouch. That hurts pretty bad. Seller is definitely one lucky cat while the buyer got burned quite significantly. I wonder how the buyer felt when he/she opened this year assessment notice.

Side note: have a little fun playing the "Crack or Shack" game from this site: http://www.crackshackormansion.com/part2.html. The idea behind the game is to choose if a house is a "Crack" or "Shack". Houses in that website worth at least $1 million even though they look awful.

1 comment:

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