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The reason property taxes won’t necessarily decline in step with assessments is because regardless of what’s happening with local real estate values, every municipality still needs to raise enough revenue to fund its operations.

For Vancouver, this year’s $1.6 billion operating budget was approved last month by council, and property taxes are, by far, the single largest revenue source for the city. (About half of your property tax bill goes to the city, while the rest funds regional and provincial services.)

Vancouver’s 2020 budget included a property tax increase of seven per cent, which represents a reduction from the 8.2 per cent increase originally presented in the draft budget, but still more than double the average annual increase over the last 10 years.

So even if your assessment has dropped by hundreds of thousands of dollars from last year, what matters is how it changed relative to other properties in your municipality. As a point of reference, a typical detached house in Vancouver saw an 11-per-cent decrease this year while a typical condo fell by seven per cent.

If your home’s value decreases more than most other properties in your jurisdiction, you might be able to expect less of a property tax hike. But if your property held its value more than others, you might be able to expect an even larger tax increase, relatively speaking, this year.

And with multimillion-dollar Vancouver mansions dropping in value more quickly than other properties, that means the city’s more affordable condos should expect a relatively larger tax increase this year, said Paul Sullivan, managing partner at property tax consulting firm Burgess, Cawley, Sullivan and Associates.