Assessment value and market value

People open a notice, compare it to what the house down the street sold for, and conclude the City has it wrong. Sometimes they are right. Usually they are comparing two different things.

Three reasons the numbers differ

The date

Your assessment estimates value on one day. For the 2026 roll that day was 2025-07-01. A sale six months later is evidence about a different market. If prices moved in between, the gap you are looking at is the market moving, not the City being wrong.

The method

A sale is one transaction between two people, and it can be unusual for a hundred reasons. An assessment is a model applied to thousands of properties for consistency. The legal standard the board applies is not whether your assessment matches a sale, it is whether your assessment is fair and equitable against similar properties.

That word, equitable, is the one that matters. The strongest ordinary residential argument is not "my house is worth less than this". It is "my assessment is out of line with houses like mine".

What the City knows

Nobody inspected your property. If your record is wrong about the lot, the year, or the property type, the model is producing a correct answer to a wrong question.

When the difference is an argument

A gap between assessment and market value is worth raising when:

• You bought the property in an arm's length sale near the valuation date, for materially less than the assessment. This is the strongest single piece of residential evidence there is.
• Comparable properties in your own community, of your own type and era, are assessed noticeably lower.
• Something is physically wrong with the property that the City has no way of knowing about, and you can show it.

When it is not

• Your neighbour's house sold high or low and yours is different.
• You think the market has fallen since the valuation date.
• Your assessment went up more than you expected in percentage terms.
• You cannot afford the tax bill. The board has no power over that.

A note on what we can and cannot measure

The City's open data publishes no building area. Nothing built on public data, ours included, can compare the size or condition of your building to anyone else's. That part of the case can only come from you, which is why the first thing we ask is what we do not already know.