Happy New Year too all, I hope everyone enjoyed a great holiday season!  As people are starting to get back to their routines, property owners in British Columbia are receiving their 2010 assessment notices this week from the British Columbia Assessment Authority. 

The notices provide property owners with the assessed value of their land and improvements for property tax purposes.  The assessed value is deemed by the Assessment Authority to be the fair market value as of July 1, 2009.  Please see my post from early December (click here) for a dialog on the assessment process in British Columbia.  The important consideration to remember when reviewing assessed values is that the assessed value is static, as of July of the previous year, and therefore is not likely to reflect current market trends.

As I mentioned in that blog post last month, the Provincial Government (via the Assessment Authority) “un-froze” the assessed values from the previous year, which were frozen in response to all the uncertainty caused by the credit crunch and resulting market turmoil in 2008.

Overall, the assessed values of all properties in Greater Victoria rose by $4 billion for 2010.  Further to the article in yesterday’s Times Colonist (click), most property owners have seen the value of their real estate assets increase from their 2009 and 2008 assessments, although there were some municipalities that saw decreases in their average assessed values.

Because assessed values normally have little correlation to current market forces, I am usually reluctant to discuss assessed values in the context of market analysis.  That being said, the data for Greater Victoria suggest that residential homes below $700,000 have seen increases fuelled mostly by low interest rate mortgage and continued consumer confidence since the 2008 credit crisis has passed.  This is best illustrated in the municipality of Esquimalt where the average assessed value increased from $459,100 in 2009 to $473,474 in 2010 for single family homes (source: Times Colonist).

Sales of higher end properties (above $700,000), were more stagnant in July 2009, although we have seen increased activity in this segment in the last three months - in fact, sales over $2 million have been seen increasing in volume over the fall and winter.  In Oak Bay, where average prices are generally higher than most areas of Greater Victoria, average assessed values decreased from $844,487 to $825,872 between 2009 and 2010 (source: Times Colonist).

I will be posting more next week about the year ahead and current market conditions, I’m heading out of town for a few days tomorrow, enjoy your weekend everyone.  In the meantime please see the Macdonald Realty January 2010 update here.

Thanks for reading, as always, please contact us for all of your real estate needs in Victoria, BC.

Sean