Why Property Assessment Is Different From What You Recently Paid: Explained Using Delicious Produce

If a property assessment is the City’s estimated value of your property, why might it be different from what you recently paid for your property?

It’s like buying vegetables. You wouldn’t put a price tag on every individual tomato. It’s not practical because it would take a long time, and who knows, even though this tomato seems nice enough on paper (it’s red, it’s round) maybe there’s something about it that makes it more or less desirable to different people.

So, you group them based on common attributes (these are all tomatoes, these are carrots, these are onions), then give each kind a typical value based on what other tomatoes have sold for throughout the year.

If you were determining the price of one vegetable, or in our case, one house -- you could determine its individual attributes and base the price on that. Since the City has to determine the value of more than a baskets worth of properties, this approach, called “mass appraisal” is the way to go.

Get more property assessment information as full of fiber as this one by checking out the rest of our videos or by visiting http://edmonton.ca/assessment.

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