Success Stories
For over four decades we have fought for property taxpayers coast to coast! In Canada, commercial property taxes typically comprise 42% of a real property's operating costs: we lighten the tax load. We launched our property tax service in Atlantic Canada in 1976 tackling assessment authorities in every corner of the region from our offices in St. John's, Newfoundland; Halifax, Nova Scotia; Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; and Saint John, New Brunswick.
As our success spread throughout the Atlantic region we were requested by clients owning real estate there to undertake property assessment appeals across Canada on all types of commercial, industrial and investment real estate. Our property tax team conducts assessment appeals on every type of property, large and small, from retail stores to shopping centres, workshops to warehouses, motels to mobile home parks, apartments to aerospace plants, pulp mills to golf courses.
In 2016 we opened our Toronto office to provide greater focus on property tax assessment appeals in the GTA and the Golden Horseshoe: Oakville, Burlington, Cambridge, Hamilton, Kitchener-Waterloo, Brantford, St. Catharines, Welland and Niagara Falls. In 2017 we expanded the reach of CompuVal®, our leading edge information technology platform, to include the communities of London, Chatham-Kent, Windsor, Sarnia, and the surrounding areas.
Property assessments are based on market value, determined by the sale prices of comparable properties. Most jurisdictions including Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Ontario, also include a “uniformity provision” requiring that property assessments of like properties be similar. Our early experience of assessment departments (who refused to make sales and assessment data available for comparison purposes) forced us to innovate. We designed and built CompuVal®, a leading edge IT platform capable of acquiring, integrating and analysing sales, property assessment, rental, revenue and operating expense data from multiple sources; flexible enough to operate in any Canadian province and able to incorporate new technologies and data sources as they became available. It also encouraged us to develop an industry leading, seven year training program which graduated Accredited Appraisers (AACI) who were also skilled negotiators and expert witnesses for property tax appeals. Our training program extends well beyond the training requirements for an Accredited Appraiser (AACI) member of the Appraisal Institute of Canada and incorporates the University of British Columbia’s Diploma in Real Estate Economics (DULE) and Bachelor of Business in Real Estate (BBRE) degree, negotiation courses through Dalhousie University and Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia, twenty five “in house” Training Modules and a mentored program of work experience. We are one of the few property tax consultants in Canada whose work is governed by a Quality System registered to the international ISO 9001 standard. The results speak for themselves: we have selected a small sample of our Success Stories for your review below:-