With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/347582
B C A S S E S S M E N T P r o m o t e d C o n t e n t commitment to these principles. "Building trust through transparency with British Columbians is how we provide a stable, reliable, uniform and up-to-date annual market-value assessment roll that is the envy of assessment agencies around the world," explains Connie Fair, BC Assessment president and CEO. "In fact, we have received delegations and speak at conferences on a regular basis so that others can learn more about one of the best models of creating property assessments and funding local governments." The Assessment Authority Act created in 1974 granted government the power to create a province-wide organization "to establish and maintain assessments that are uniform in the whole of British Columbia." Six months later, BC Assessment produced the province's irst impartial and independent assessment roll and assessment notices. Major assessment problems that existed prior to the formation of BC Assessment included ineficiency and a lack of professionalism, impartiality and consistency, but BC Assessment's creation has ensured these issues have been fully resolved. "I was fortunate enough to become CEO of a great company in 2008 that already had a reputation as one of the best assessment agencies in the world; my goal has been to take us to the leading edge of innovation in our industry to absorb the annual growth in new properties and maintain accurate information," says Fair. "When we were created in 1974, we had a staff of 700 and about 800,000 properties on the Assessment Roll. Today, we are responsible for nearly two million properties, but with less staff than when we irst started because we have been able to adopt innovative methodologies." BC Assessment employs approximately 670 staff working in 16 ofices throughout British Columbia. A current example of how BC Assessment is using business innovation in its work is the enhancement of assessment services to strata property owner customers. "We are very pleased to be the irst property assessment organization in the world to pilot the application of Esri Canada's new and innovative 3D geographic information system modelling technoloy," says Hart Mauritz, BCA's vice-president of From top: Visualizing Vancouver strata through 3D modelling reveals insights and potential errors that are difficult to capture when viewing information through traditional means; Connie Fair, BC Assessment president and CEO. business innovation. "In the Vancouver Sea-to-Sky assessment region we have over 120,000 residential strata units, growing at a steep rate. It is challenging to physically inspect this property type for assessment purposes." The 3D GIS modelling technoloy from Esri Canada will enable BC Assessment to further enhance the accuracy of its property data and increase operational eficiencies. When determining assessed values, BC Assessment appraisers analyze timely real estate sales transactions to ind comparable properties. In addition, they consider a property's unique characteristics such as location, age, condition, size and view. In addition to leading techniques in photo imagery, BC Assessment maintains crucial data on building footprints, electronic building plans and permits, street-front photographs and mapping. "We have taken this emerging technoloy to build instruments that an appraiser can use to virtually inspect a property from her or his desktop,"