Hamilton ratepayers who challenged their new property rating valuations will have to wait several months for the outcome after the council failed to complete any of the 588 objections before the new rates were set at the start of the month.
Homeowners in Hamilton received their new valuations at the end of April and the city’s average RV jumped 57% to $922,800 since the last round of RVs were issued three years ago.
The council received 588 objections to the new RVs, just up on the 542 objections lodged during the last revaluations in 2018.
Of the 588 received this year, 179 ratepayers asked for their RV to be increased and 382 wanted it decreased.
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The remaining 27 fell into the ‘other’ category where the ratepayer agreed with the RV, but might instead be objecting to the Land Value and Value of Improvements or to property data other than the values. The deadline for objections was 8 June, 2022.
Hamilton City Council finance support services manager Matthew Bell confirmed no review of any of the objections had been completed to date, but said he expected this to ramp up over the coming weeks and be completed within “a couple of months”.
The council had initially planned to review all the objections prior to the rates being set on July 1 and would still amend these if a property’s value changed as a result of a revaluation objection.
Council blamed the delays on its valuer, Opteon, having to focus on other valuation tasks such as building consents and subdivisions before the council set the rates for the 2022/23 financial year. Rates went up an average 4.9% from July 1, 2022.
Red Bricks director and agent Rupert Bain knew of people who had been passed onto the valuation firm after seeking clarity from a council staffer about how their new RVs had been calculated, but had not heard back from them.
Bain had personally objected to some of his RVs and hadn’t been able to get any answers from the council. “They put it back to the valuers who did that, but since then nothing.”
“If they can’t articulate how they are doing these valuations and clearly do it, what hope has joe public got if there’s not a clear way of how they are valuing this stuff up.”
Bain told OneRoof at the time the revaluations were released that there appeared to be a large number of errors in the council’s latest property revaluations – with some far too high and others too low.
“We’ve had values coming in that are absolutely absurd.”
One example was a three-bedroom, one-bathroom property in Chartwell on a 1000sqm section with a new RV of $2.1m. The current market estimate for this type of property, if sold to a developer, was about $1m, Bain said.
Lodge managing director Jeremy O’Rourke said he hadn’t heard of anyone waiting to hear back on an RV objection and it would usually only make a difference to someone selling who thought it was too low and was waiting on the outcome before putting it on the market.
However, he said with only about 1% of property owners making an objection and less than 2% of houses for sale, the chances were the people objecting to them did not have their properties on the market.
But O’Rourke said RVs did not matter as people bought houses based on value and not RVs and there would still be a range of properties that would sell both under and over based on demand for that property.
“They don’t pretend it’s an exact science, they don’t pretend they’ve told you what your house is worth – it's for rating purposes only.”
Hamilton’s RVs were based on what the property would have sold for on 1 September 2021.
- Disclaimer: The reporter is one of the 588 submitters who has lodged an objection.
