Home Understanding property assessment Compare your assessment and search sale prices The Re-inspection Program Property Tax Accountability Mechanism Tax benefit programs Questioning your assessment? Legislation Assessment office locations Other important links

• The property assessment process in New Brunswick
• How property assessment factors into your tax bill
• Market value (and why assessments are based on it)

Additional Questions and Answers:

• The role of Property Assessment Services
• Basic questions on assessment and property taxes
• Understanding your Assessment & Tax Notice

The property assessment process in New Brunswick

Service New Brunswick employs a team of more than 100 assessors located across the province. These professionals review the market value of more than 450,000 properties in New Brunswick each year.

Assessors look at a variety of factors including the sale prices of homes or properties in your neighbourhood and any recent renovations that you may have made to your property. So, if local sale prices are increasing and/or you've done renovations, then it's very likely that your home or property has increased in value too.

When several properties in your neighbourhood sell for more than their assessed value, this suggests a higher value for all properties in that neighbourhood - even though no physical improvements may have been made to any of these properties. These trends are then analyzed and used to make adjustments to assessments to bring them in line with their new market value. As real estate values in most areas of New Brunswick - in particular, the southern cities - have been increasing over the last few years, one can expect assessments to reflect these increased market values.

As the old saying goes, "looks can be deceiving". Your house and your neighbour's house may look very much the same but there are a lot of factors that distinguish one from the other and could result in a different assessment for each property. Many of these factors are listed here and the most obvious are ones like finished basements, age and quality of the building, and type of garage.

Even two seemingly identical houses can have very different assessments if they are located in different parts of a city, in a different community, or subjected to measurably different market forces. (Imagine for a minute the market value of your house in downtown Toronto or in Woodstock - two neighbourhoods with very different real estate markets.) The bottom line is that an assessment is unique to each individual house or property. To find out more about how your assessment compares to others in your neighbourhood, click here.

How property assessment factors into your tax bill

Property assessment, based on market value, plays a valuable and important role in financing local and provincial services across the province. The assessed value of homes and other properties within a municipality or rural area make up what is known as the tax base. As part of their annual municipal budget process, municipalities use their tax base to determine what tax rate they need to finance their spending for the following year.

For most home owners within a municipality, your tax bill is largely a result of the following equation:

For certain types of property like rental, industrial, recreational and commercial, as well as homes in local service districts (LSDs); the provincial government also applies a tax to help defray the cost of provincially-provided services.

Market value and why assessments are based on it

Market value is the most probable price that a property would sell for on the open real estate market at a given point in time - January 1 of each tax year. It is the predominant method of assessment in more than 125 countries around the world.

The market value of a property is used to establish the assessment because it is an understandable method (real estate prices are published every day in the paper) and it is considered the most equitable and realistic measure of a property's worth. The sale prices of real estate transactions are now public knowledge and this transparency helps promote fairness.

Assessors in New Brunswick review and measure each localized real estate market to establish typical market values. Put another way, assessors aren't actually determining market value; they are reflecting the values that have been established by buyers and sellers in local real estate markets.

Factors that affect market value could include:

• property location (including nearness to green spaces, community services, and access)
• total finished floor area of a home
• lot size
• basement or lower level of home development (finished floor, walls and ceiling)
• quality of construction - materials and labour
• age of building and abnormal depreciation
• existence and type of garage
• traffic influences or neighbourhood characteristics and in the case of income producing properties, the income generated by that property