Property taxes on homeowners in N.B. cities surge after year of record real estate sales

Robert Caverly moved from McAdam to Moncton last fall and was burned in the city's sizzling housing market.  

He ended up paying $235,000 for a house on Fifth Street assessed to be worth barely half of that amount. That was painful enough, but when Caverly's property tax bill arrived this month he was stunned by the $3,186 charge, an $1,100 increase over what the house was billed last year.

"I pay more. I understand that. But there's been absolutely no renovations done on the house," said Caverly. "There's no difference in the house.

"We're basically paying an extra hundred bucks a month just for taxes."

Caverly's experience is extreme, but property taxes are up for tens of thousands of homeowners this year, and  assessment increases driven by rising property values have been doing all the lifting.

The biggest tax jumps on average have been in Fredericton, where records compiled by the website propertize.ca for CBC News show the median tax bill on owner-occupied single-family houses in the city this year have risen $213, to $3,206.   

Last November, Fredericton council voted to reduce the municipality's tax rate 1.6 per cent, but assessment increases on homes throughout the city averaged eight per cent and higher. That meant higher bills for homeowners this spring, despite the tax rate reduction.

In November,  Ward 12 councillor and finance committee chair Henri Mallet told CBC News that local political leaders were torn on how high the tax-rate cut should be, given how much property assessments were escalating.

"Some people wanted a bit more, some might have wanted a bit less, so we could reinvest in our community, so it was kind of a happy medium for council," Mallet said about the 1.6 per cent reduction. 

Fredericton has the lowest tax rate among New Brunswick's three largest cities, but homeowners pay the highest property tax bills because Fredericton has the highest property assessments.

It is the exact opposite in Saint John.

It has the highest tax rate among the three cities but this year, the median property tax bill on owner-occupied single family houses in Saint John is the lowest of the group, at $2,815, according to the propertize.ca data.  

Property tax bills in Saint John also grew the least from last year, thanks to a 4.2 per cent tax-rate cut passed by the city.

Saint John Mayor Donna Reardon is frustrated people don't view Saint John as a low tax jurisdiction because of the city's still high tax rate. Low and slow-growing assessments in Saint John have kept individual tax bills down, but Reardon believes few people focus on that