Analysis of The Property Tax Valuation Guide Map

The new online valuation mapping tool provided by Revenue is probably getting tens of thousands of hits every day as property owners try and find out  how much property tax they might have to pay. More about Valuation Web Site Here

The Revenue Interactive Property Valuation guide allows users to zoom in on electoral districts and see average  property values for different types of house (detached/ semi/ bungalow/ apartment) .  (There are about 3400 electoral districts with populations ranging from 17000 down to 200)

How accurate is the Revenue Valuation Guide ?

Firstly – it is meant only as a guide and not to be a definite figure for the Property Tax .  Just because your type of house is showing as being in Band 2 for the property tax ( 100,001 to 150,000) – it doesn’t mean that is the property tax you will have to pay.

The vast bulk of the valuation data used by Revenue has come from  from house sales since 2010.  The government only started charging stamp duty on all house purchases in 2010 . The main reason for this was to enable the data to be used to build a property price register. Stamp Duty data doesn’t have  any information  about the type of house or the size of  house.

The sale price data of just  51600 houses was used for the project. That is just 2.5% of all residential property in Ireland.  Not a great starting point .

Revenue supplemented the stamp duty data with 1000 Nama valuations and 1300 valuations by professional valuers. So that was a total of 53,900 property sale prices or valuations.

Prices were adjusted to take account of changes as per the CSO price register to bring them all down to a  mid 2012 estimate.

The house value data was then matched to specific properties held on a Geo Directory which also holds some information about property type (detached / semi etc)

Only 36800 properties out of 53900 were matched – and it was these properties that were used to build the full valuation model for the whole country. The number of Dublin area  properties was 15693 , properties in other cities (Cork, Limerick, Galway and Waterford) totalled 3039 and the rest of the properties (18014) were from other areas.

Revenue’s own documentation estimates that the online valuation tool will place properties in the correct valuation band in just 48% of cases.

They also  estimate that 22% of properties will be valued one band too low and that 21% of homes will be valued at one band too high. That’s a total of 43% of homes valued incorrectly by just one band – or 52% of properties valued incorrectly.
About 10% of properties could be out by 2 valuation bands or more.
Looking at it another way – 90% of properties will be either correctly  banded or within 1 valuation band of the correct one.
The majority of incorrectly valued properties will be detached houses and apartments.

The main point to remember  is that whilst the valuation tool might be a good starting point – it does not mean that the value shown is the value you have to use.

The property tax forms are already on the way out this month – and there will be an estimate of the property tax due printed on it for each property.  In many cases the estimate on the form may not match  the valuation people see on the Revenue mapping tool . That is going to cause even more confusion .

The Revenue don’t know the house type (semi/ detached / bungalow) of each and every individual property in the country. (That question  should have been asked when they set up the Household Charge – but all they asked was if it was a house or an apartment !)

So any property tax estimate on the form will probably be based on average values in the whole area –  for all property types. So we expect the estimates not to be an accurate reflection of  house value in the majority of cases.

But – people must realise that the estimate is NOT  a valuation. You are responsible for valuing your house for the property tax.  The estimate is the  amount that Revenue will chase you for if you dont return a completed property tax return.

Read all our articles about the Property Tax here and find out more about how and when to pay the property tax , exemptions from the property tax ,  deferrals and  deductions from salary and penalties.