By William Tatsiou, former member of the Assessment Review Board and solicitor

How to successfully appeal your assessment and reduce your taxes without a lawyer.  For residential appeals:

1. Serve MPAC with a Request for Reconsideration and give reasons why your assessment is too high. If you appeal and subsequently settle you get a refund of the fee. Moreover, MPAC will often agree with you and give you a reduction to avoid an appeal to the Assessment Review Board.

2. Ask MPAC for the subject Property Summary Report for your home to review and correct any errors in MPAC's records. For instance, if your home is one storey and MPAC's records show a two storey home the assessment will reflect incorrect informaiton.

3. Ask MPAC to confirm how the property was assessed and what comparables MPAC used. MPAC's Property Comparison Report is free but most homeowners fail to ask for this report and only end up getting it on the day of the hearing at the Assessment Review Board. At the hearing the owner has very little time to review MPAC's report and the owner is at a great disadvantage conducting the hearing. Here MPAC enjoys an advantage because it has access to confidential information months in advance of the hearing.

4. Prepare a list of six comparables in the vicinity and ask MPAC to prepare and provide for you the Owner's Property Comparables Report (again this is free). This will have detailed information such as total square footage, number of bathrooms and fireplaces and the quality class of the home. This information is not available from your real estate agent. Moreover, MPAC will do all your work in this regard for free. This is were the system levels the playing field. Most people do not know their rights and fail to take advantge of their legal rights. They get frustrated and angry but some of this emotion arises out of ignorance as they cannot understand the Multiple Regression Analysis Model. Therefore you should keep things simple.

5. Review all the sales of similar homes on both the Owner's Property Comparables Report  and MPAC's Property Comparison Report (both prepared for you for free and will often include six comparables for both parties for a total of 12). Look at the range of sales: the high and low; look at the average (take all the sale prices and total them up and then divide by the number of sales) and median  (the middle sale within the range). Do the same for the assessments (even with a sale MPAC may assess the comparable differently) . Compare the results to your assessment.

6. To adjust for larger and smaller homes you can do the same analysis on a dollar per square foot for total building area. For example, if your house is 1000 square feet and is assessment at $100,000 the assessment is $100 per square foot for total building area. Do the same for all the comparables. This allows you to compare apples and apples.

7. If your assessment is higher than the average and median you are over assessed. This an objective test. There is no emotion as mathematics  and statistics do not allow for anger or other emotions that are subjective.

8. Always remember the onus  is on the person complaining (most often the home owner). In some cases the mucipality or MPAC will complain your assessment is too low and they become the complainant.

9. Most home owners fail to introduce any evidence and lose before they even start as the onus is on the complainant ( the home owner in your case if you appeal your assessment).

10. In Ontario the leading case is Viva where the Divisional Court  held  that the best evidence of correct current value is an arm's length sale of the subject property close to the valuation date. Notwithstanding the Viva decision MPAC and some members of the Assessment Review Board may still require corroborating evidence ( such as a second sale, letter of opinion or appraisal). This is often the case where the owner purchased the property from a bank under power of sale or from an estate.

If you have any questions on assessments email The Toronto Times and we will attempt to get an answer for you For FREE.