Representatives of the Saskatchewan Assessment Management Agency discussed the reinspection of properties that occurred in the city last year, and how it affected this year’s assessments, during a speech to Estevan city council on June 11.
Graham Stearns, Carrie Lalonde and Joanne Fraser also answered questions from city council.
SAMA provided a full inventory of all buildings in the city, including buildings exempt from property taxes and municipal buildings. There has been a one per cent jump in taxable assessment, Stearns said to council.
Representatives inspected all of the properties in Estevan, and updated all of its sales information, its appraisal models on the residential side and other information.
The assessment roll was delivered to the city on May 28, much later than normal.
“It’s nice to be timely, but it’s really good to be timely and pretty accurate,” said Stearns. “It’s not so great to be timely and really inaccurate.”
SAMA is confident they delivered a “top-notch product” to the city.
The agency didn’t enter individual properties for this reinspection like they did for the last one in 1993. Now they make their evaluations by viewing from the street, and noting if a garage or a deck has been added, or a basement has been remodelled.
“We get most of the information we need by exterior evaluations,” said Stearns. “Basement finish is a factor, definitely, and when we are verifying the exterior of the property, we don’t kneel down and peak in windows, but you can see walking by, very easily, if there’s finishing around the basement.”
If they don’t talk to the property owner, they will estimate 60 per cent finish on the finish to the basement. If they do talk to the owner, and the owner says it is finished, it will be evaluated as 80 per cent complete.
He stressed that SAMA’s job isn’t to punish people for making improvements. It’s to assign value to property. By making improvements, people have made extended the lives of their property.
Fraser said 25 garages were added last year, with an assessed value of $460,000. A total of 437 decks added about $2.2 million in assessed value. And more than $3 million was added in air conditioning. Basement finish will generate $9.2 million. Plumbing improvements added around $500,000.
Between 95 and 98 per cent of people they approached were accommodating, Stearns said.
SAMA also wants to see commercial properties updated province-wide. Lalonde, a senior commercial market specialist, supplied the results of the commercial reinspection.
“We added approximately $5.3 million with the commercial rate inspection. That’s not a taxable number. That’s an overall property value,” said Lalonde.
There were a lot of changes to properties that occurred during the economic boom that SAMA could not keep pace with, such as the addition of sea-cans, relocatable offices and office mezzanines.
Many of the questions from council focused on the findings of last year’s reassessment, which resulted in some properties, particularly commercial, experiencing a significant spike in property tax values.
Mayor Roy Ludwig and other members of council suggested a limit on how much a property can increase or decrease.
“Between 2010 and 2014, there was such a huge increase in market at that time, so that’s what we had to reflect,” said Lalonde. “So that’s what most people were seeing in their change in value was market value. Now we can’t reflect what’s happening now until 2021.”
Stearns said the province had moderate increases for a long time, but then properties went through an explosion in value during the boom years. He predicted property value increases should be more moderate moving forward.
Council also wanted to know which communities have in-house assessment services, and the standards that have to be followed. Stearns said those communities have to follow the same procedures as SAMA.
Councillor Lyle Yanish, meanwhile, said he didn’t want to see a 24-year wait for the next reinspection, and Stearns agreed with that statement.
The last provincial reassessment was carried out in 2015, when was in the early stages of the economic slowdown. Results were released until last year.
Stearns also apologized to council for delays in this year’s assessment roll.
“Rest assured that this was a very big project,” said Stearns. “Reinspection of a city is not one that SAMA undertakes very often, and it usually is a multi-year process.”
The delay in the assessment roll meant city council was not able to approved the proposed one per cent property tax increase until June 11, which was much later than normal.
