City’s property valuer ‘incompetent’

MY LETTER, “It seems that this City doesn’t work for me”, dated July 26 refers.

New information points to the incompetence of valuers appointed by the City of Cape Town as highlighted below.

My property’s value in the general valuation roll in 2015 (GV2015) was R1 million. In 2018, with the GV2018 the value of my property increased by 68% to R1.68m.

After objecting to the increased value, it was further increased by an additional 43% to R2.4m.

This translated to an increase in the value of a whopping 140% from 2015 to 2018, despite no alterations to my property for the past 20 years.

Upon appealing the decision of the objection of my property’s value, I was informed that the selling prices of four properties in the area were used as a yardstick to appraise my property.

This would not have been problematic had it not been for the dates of the sale of these four properties based on the following stipulation pertaining to valuations reflected on the City’s website, ie “the date of valuation must be a maximum of 12 months before the start of the financial year in which the valuation roll will be implemented”.

And since the date of implementation for GV2018 is July 1, 2020, the latest date for an evaluation of any property should be July 2, 2018.

Herein lies the problem.

The dates of the sales of the four properties were all in 2019, well after the cut-off date of July 2, 2018.

According to the City’s valuer, my property appeared to be comparable but slightly superior to the two properties sold at R2.1m and R2.3m, and hence was subsequently valued at R2.4m.

The latter points to another problem.

While my property’s value was increased to R2.4m, the values of the two properties used to determine my property’s value remained unchanged at R1.282 and R1.391 on the general valuation roll for 2018, despite their corresponding selling prices of R2.1m and R2.3m.

In conclusion, am I correct in claiming that the valuer appointed by the City who appraised my property is grossly incompetent?

You be the judge. ADIEL ISMAIL | Mountview