Case Studies
Valuation and real estate appraisal tasks fall into one of two groups: adversarial or non-adversarial. Both situations present different opportunities for our property advisory Valuation Team to add value to the assignment.
Adversarial assignments can rapidly escalate into a costly, time consuming and frustrating legal exercise. Our prime objective therefore is to provide a solution which avoids litigation and an expensive court action. This can only be achieved by an open, consultative and transparent process involving all parties, thorough research, and a well-documented valuation report with a fully supported, unbiased, conclusion, the rationale for which is technically and legally valid but easily understood by a non-technical reader. The proof of the pudding is in the eating … virtually all of the cases involving our property advisory Valuation Team are resolved amicably and the few that do proceed to court are usually decided in our favour.
Non-adversarial assignments provide many opportunities to add value to your real estate even when the purpose of the assignment is directed to a single goal, for example establishing Market Value for financing purposes. Members of our Valuation Team are trained to recognise and identify opportunities to enhance or safeguard the short and long term prospects for your property and can call upon the expertise of our other Divisions (Property Tax, Planning, Lasercad® Space Measurement, Counselling, Economic Intelligence, Brokerage) for advice if such is required. For example, there may be opportunities to reduce the property taxes, to “up zone” or prevent a “down zoning”, increase the “BOMA” leasable area, restructure the leases, increase the rents, reduce operating costs, or make cosmetic changes which would enhance marketability and value. Our property advisory Valuation Team will deploy our proprietary multi-million dollar IT platform CompuVal®, a powerful family of software applications which integrates and analyses property sales, assessment, vacancy, revenue and expense data. It allows our Valuation Team to benchmark your property with similar real estate, analyse the revenue and operating expenses, and run trend line analysis to identify further opportunities to add value to your real estate asset.
Our Valuation Team has been active throughout Atlantic Canada for over four decades, providing valuation and real estate advice on just about every property type and for all purposes … Transfer of Ownership (purchase or disposal, merger and acquisition, partnership valuation, foreclosure, rental value, due diligence), Financing, Litigation (assessment appeals, expropriation, divorce, environmental contamination, defects in title, professional liability, bankruptcy, fraud and misrepresentation, First Nations Land Claims), Fire Insurance (actual cash value, replacement cost), Performance Measurement (portfolio evaluation, company asset analysis, highest and best use, feasibility studies, tenant mix), Financial Reporting (International Financial Reporting Standards, balance sheet), Taxation (charitable donations, property assessment, capital gains tax, HST self-assessment, ecological gift program, estate settlement, conservation easements, gift or inheritance), and Appraisal Review. The real estate Case Studies that follow are a small sample of the assignments we have undertaken since 1976.