Trying to make sense of his property tax bills after buying his first home, Shawn Peterson decided to take matters into his own hands.
The computer-savvy Saint Johner designed a website that takes public information from a government database and presents it in a more user-friendly way, allowing people to compare their property assessments with their neighbours’.
“It’s human nature,” Peterson says.
“Everyone wants to put in their street and see where their house is in relation to their neighbours’.”
It’s the second year the website has been online and now has the updated assessment and tax numbers for 2011.
Peterson says the frustration with the property tax system drives people’s curiosity.
“People are dealing with crazy, crazy assessments right now,” he says.
“In Saint John, there are an insane amount of houses for sale right now and nothing’s moving. But while housing prices aren’t really changing,” he says.
“My house is almost going down. I probably couldn’t put it on the market and sell it for what I paid for it a couple years ago when the market was hot. But that doesn’t mean my assessment’s going to start going down.”
Originally just for his own use, then for his friends and family, Propertize.ca covers homes across the entire province.
“After we bought our home, we were interested in the whole property tax system and how houses were assessed,” he says.
“I was talking to a few people at work and they were interested in it, so I sent it along to them. They sent it along to some of their friends and it kind of spiralled out of control from there.”
Since property tax bills started appearing in mailboxes this week, the number of visitors has begun to skyrocket. About 1,300 unique users have logged on this week, with 600 of those coming on Wednesday alone.
“It’s all straight word of mouth. This isn’t something I’m advertising or making money off,” he says.
Service New Brunswick offers the same information on its own website, but the design makes it harder to navigate, Peterson says.
“New Brunswick does have one which is barely accessible. It’s pretty open, it’s just a pain to use,” he says, since it makes users look up neighbours one house at a time rather than presenting a comprehensive comparison on one page.
“It’s a very painful process.”
Peterson’s site doesn’t have its own database, but rather instantly retrieves the information entered from the government website, along with relevant figures for nearby houses.
Brent Staeben, spokesman for Service New Brunswick, says he’s aware of the limitations of the government’s website.
“That’s certainly in our plan right now to improve that front interface to make it a little easier to use,” in time for next year’s tax season, he says, adding that Peterson’s version is a welcome addition.
“The more people see sale prices and compare assessments, the better they can gauge the fairness of their assessment, which is the foundation of the system.”
Premier David Alward has said his government will meet with stakeholders to improve the current system, while also instituting a two-year cap that limits assessment increases in the meantime.
Staeben says the cap resulted in a total of $6.5 million of savings across the province’s 450,000 properties this year. Property taxes provide about $1 billion in revenue each year.
Contrary to popular belief, Staeben says property values do occasionally go down – three per cent of properties decreased in value in 2011.
“It’s kind of an urban myth that property assessments don’t go down. There were actually 13,506 properties in the province whose assessments went down,” due to decreases in market value, he says.
The rest of the properties saw increases, with 66 per cent increasing by less than three per cent, 20 per cent by three to five per cent and seven per cent were between five and 10 per cent.
Staeben says the four per cent that increased by more than 10 per cent mostly consist of a specific type of home.
“If you look at the amount of properties that had renovations in the province in the past year and also the amount of new properties that are built, that pretty much reflects people who are doing renovations and building new properties.”
