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Home Legal Matters Property valuations ever
The Council of Ministers has submitted a bill to Parliament to increase the frequency of general property valuations carried out by the Department of Lands & Surveys from three years to five years.
General property valuations
Originally, general property valuations were based on an assessment of a property's value at 1st January 1980. This 1980 valuation was used to calculate an annual Immovable Property Tax payable to the Tax Department and an annual tax to the Community or the Municipality in which the property was situated. Community and Municipality councils have the power to raise and set these local taxes.
(Note that the annual Immovable Property Tax payable to the Tax Department was abolished as of 1 January 2017, but remains in force for calculating a ‘local' property tax payable to Communities and Municipalities.)
It had long been recognised that the 1980 values were out of date and bore no relation to the worth of a property.
As a consequence, the Department of Lands and Surveys announced plans in 2011 to revalue all property on the Island starting in 2012 and will set the ‘new' market values as they stand on 1st January 2013, which would be used for taxation purposes.
By October 2014 the Department of Lands and Surveys had received more than 4,600 objections to their property revaluations while a further 7,000 or so objections had been received by the Citizens Service Centres. MPs also reported receiving hundreds of complaints.
So great was the number of objections, the deadline for their submission was extended by four months.
In 2018 the Department of Lands & Surveys updates the values of more than two million properties and repeated the exercise in 2021.
However, the bill placed before Parliament will see the next general property valuations carried out by the Department of Lands & Surveys put on hold until 2026.Subsequent valuations will take place every five years (assuming the bill is approved by Parliament.)
Property valuations reaction
On Tuesday, the Cyprus Real Estate Agents Registration Council released a statement supporting the bill to increase the frequency of property valuations from three to five years saying that it would lighten the workload on the Department of Land and Surveys, allowing it to focus on other tasks
As the council' president Marinos Kineyirou explained “We have raised the issue many times, both in private meetings with government officials and in our public statements.
“We believe that conducting a general valuation every three years is unnecessary, as the fluctuations that may occur over such a short period are minimal to insignificant, while at the same time, the workload placed on the Department of Land and Surveys, one of the most critical sections of the state, increases.”
It should be noted that general property valuations do not reflect a property's market value; it is only used for taxation purposes.
Those wishing to obtain a market value of their property should contact a RICS valuation surveyor or a member of the Cyprus Property Valuers Association.
Source
Cyprus Property News
