What your home is actually worth in Penticton
By Dan Jones ·
Bottom line: your BC Assessment is not what your house will sell for, and no online estimate can tell you either. An assessment reflects what the property would have sold for on or about July 1 of the previous year, produced by mass appraisal without anyone walking through your kitchen. Its job is apportioning property tax, not pricing a sale. What actually sets the number is recent comparable sales, what a buyer can choose instead of yours right now, and the condition of the house, which is the adjustment most often done badly. The only way to get close is for someone who understands construction to walk the property and then look honestly at what has sold nearby.
I am Dan Jones, a REALTOR with Royal LePage Locations West in Penticton, licence number 1118346. I have been licensed since 2004, and for twenty-four years before that I built houses as a Red Seal journeyman carpenter, which is the part that matters when condition is what separates two otherwise identical homes.
The honest answer is that nobody can tell you from a screen, and anybody who gives you a firm number without seeing the place is guessing.
That is not a dodge. It is the whole point of this post, because the reason the number cannot be produced remotely is the same reason online estimates and assessments miss.
Your BC Assessment is not your sale price
The most common misunderstanding I deal with, in both directions.
An assessment reflects what the property would have sold for on or about July 1 of the previous year, produced by mass appraisal rather than an inspection. Nobody walked through your kitchen. Its purpose is apportioning property tax, not pricing a sale.
So when an assessment sits above what I tell you the house will sell for, it usually means the market moved after that July, or the model assumed a condition your house does not have. It runs the other way too, where work has been done that the model never saw.
Full detail: why your BC Assessment is not your sale price.
What actually sets the number
Comparable sales. What genuinely similar properties nearby have actually sold for recently. Not list prices. Sold prices. A list price is an opinion; a sale is evidence.
Active listings. What a buyer can choose instead of yours, right now. You are not priced against history, you are priced against the alternatives.
Condition. This is the adjustment that gets done badly, and it is where I spend my time.
Two houses on the same street, same square footage, same year, can be different assets. One has twenty years left on the roof, a dry basement and a grade that runs away from the foundation. The other has two years on the roof, a patio poured level with no fall, and staining at the base of the drywall.
I spent twenty-four years building houses before I sold them. I can see which is which, and so can the buyer’s inspector. The difference between those two houses is real money, and pretending otherwise just means finding out during subject removal instead of before listing.
Online estimates
Automated valuations use the same basic inputs as a mass appraisal. Recent sales, property characteristics, some statistical smoothing. They are a reasonable starting point for a common house in a neighbourhood with a lot of turnover.
They get least reliable exactly where this market is most interesting: acreage, view properties, anything hillside, anything renovated, anything unusual, anything with very few comparables. Which describes a lot of the South Okanagan.
Use one to get oriented. Do not price a house on one.
What a home evaluation actually is
When I do an evaluation, you get an opinion of value supported by market evidence, plus what I would do before listing and roughly what it should cost.
It is not an appraisal. An appraisal is a formal valuation by a certified appraiser, usually ordered by a lender. If you need a valuation for financing, a probate, or a separation agreement, you need an appraiser and I will tell you so.
It also is not binding on a buyer. It is my best read of what the market will pay. The market gets the final say, and sometimes it disagrees with me.
I will walk the property first. It takes about an hour and there is no cost and no obligation. If the honest answer is that you should wait, or that a repair should happen first, you will get that answer.
You can request one here.
Current numbers
I have deliberately not put a price per square foot or a neighbourhood average in this post, because it would be wrong within a season and someone would find it a year from now and rely on it.
The Association of Interior Realtors publishes benchmark and average prices by area every month. Those are the figures worth looking at, and I can pull them for your specific area and property type, Wiltse, Columbia/Duncan, Okanagan Falls, Summerland, Naramata, whatever applies, along with what has actually sold nearby in the last few months.
Email me and say which area and what kind of property. That is a five-minute answer.
Condos are a different exercise
For a strata property the documents move the number as much as the finishes do. A healthy contingency fund, a current depreciation report and no looming special levy are worth real money. The reverse is worth real money in the other direction.
What to check before you buy into a BC strata covers what I read and why.
The short version
Your assessment is a tax figure from last July. An online estimate is a starting point. What your house is worth is what a buyer will pay for it in the condition it is in, and the only way to get close to that is for someone who knows construction to walk through it and then look honestly at what has sold.