council tax - querying banding and associated refund

slummymummyof3

Hi Guys,
Hopefully I am posting this in the right place. Having looked at the updated article on this site with regards to being in the correct council tax band and claiming a refund, I decided to look further in to it.

I bought my house in July 2001 for £159,000 - council tax band 'D'.
When I did the valuation checker for 1991 prices it came up as £93,471.
House was build in 1983 and sold for £38,500 (as per the deeds).
Looking at the above figures (in particular 1991) it would appear that I am banded correctly. However, I put in the figures for 2 identical properties in my road which have sold since and it has thrown up some anomalies:

Neighbour 1 - House purchased July 2003 for £187,000 - council tax band 'D'.
1991 valuation checker - £74,813 (equating to band 'D' in 1991)

Neighbour 2 - House purchased August 2007 for £220,000 - council tax 'D'
1991 valuation checker - £65,635

Using the figures from neighbour 2, it would appear that the banding should have been a 'C' and we all have the same house type.

Using another example: Neighbour 3 - house purchased April 07 for £280,000
also council tax 'D' but is a much larger property than mine and neighbours 1&2, 1991 valuation checker £84,542 - this 1991 price was equivalent to a band 'D'.

Any advice before I go wading in to try and reclaim some council tax and get my house band reduced?

vivatifosi

Hi slummymummy,

There's a long thread on council tax rebanding on the tax thread.

The key issue is that the VOA does not accept information from valuation checkers as they can be quite inaccurate - easily enough to change by a band. This is because house values differ from type to type and from town to town and the checkers cannot distinguish between these.

You can do two things though: check local house prices in the local paper archives (normally in the town library) for the period from the end of 1990 to early 1991. These will be the houses that would likely have sold c April 1991, when CT values were set. Bear in mind that these are asking prices so will generally be higher.

You can also speak to neighbours who tend to remember these things.

You will have a much better chance of getting a reband if you can find a neighbour that's in band C, so try and focus your search on that. If the VOA's site shows a "banding history" then the band has been changed since the CT was set, if it doesn't then the valuation in CT terms has always been such.

Hope this helps.

lincroft1710

As "valuation checker" (by which I presume you mean a lender's House Price Index) shows your house as Band E(!), one neighbour Band D and one Band C, something seems amiss and its probably the HPI!! Since these houses were built in 1983, probability is that there are actual 1991 sales on which your band was based. Evidence of an actual sale round April 1991 is far more reliable than trying to work back from sales 10/15 yrs later.

slummymummyof3

I was querying why the leanders house price index was giving 3 completley different 1991 valuations on exactly the same house type purely by me providing the house prices of the 3 houses bought in 2001 (£159,000), 2003 (£187,000) and 2007 (£220,000). How does that work? It seems that the higher the recent purchase price, the lower the equivalent 1991 valuation which doesn't make sense. Am I missing something fundamental here?

Incidentally, all the houses in the road are either band 'D' or 'E', we only have 3 or 4 bedroomed houses. The largest of the 4 bed types with ensuites and a study are band 'E', the 3 beds and smallest 4 beds are band 'D' and a larger 4 bed type (but without study and ensuite) are also band 'D'. There seems no rhyme or reason for these properties to have all been lumped in as a band 'D'

lincroft1710

Band D has a range £68,001 - £88,000 at 1991 levels of value, thus many different house types will fall into this band. Your research has backed up the conclusion that I reached many years ago that HPIs are next to useless.

slummymummyof3

I find it quite bizarre that the updated article on council tax reclaiming on this site recommends that you use the calculator to check what your house would have been worth in 1991 and when researching it themselves didn't come across this problem.
I did go on the land registry website and went into the archive (only goes back as far as Jan-Mar 1995 though) and put my post code in. It said that the 'average' detached house price for the area was £60,125 in Jan-Mar 1995. So the plot thickens on my mission to get my house rebanded!

vivatifosi

HPIs are fine in so far as they help people get into a 1991 mindset and can take a house that they often didn't live in then and get a feel for the pricing. They are however next to useless for anything that requires more fine tuning. Lincroft said in his/her opinion that they were out by about 15%, and from my experience I've found exactly the same thing. They can only be 100% accurate for 100% average houses.

The problem is that to make reclaiming council tax "sexy" rather than the damn hard slog that it can be, you need a quick option. There are many people over on the success board who clearly have used the index and got a refund without doing any work other than typing in a couple of numbers. Their house price was probably out by a large margin to start with, or the one identical house in the street that happens to be up a band by mistake. Great news for them! I wish my cases were that straightforward!

But if you are anywhere near the margins, which in all likelihood most houses that could be rebanded are, certainly most of the questions I've answered over on the CT thread were, then a heck of a lot more research is needed to prove your case.

There's only one way to win a well argued tribunal - if your case goes that far - and that's to get compelling relevant evidence, generally that means you can show that the 1991 price for your house is incorrect, and that's from building the best possible data from that period from local papers and speaking to your neighbours about what they paid back then.

You will not believe the number of people who go to tribunal and say things like "my Mum's house is a D and its bigger, therefore mine should be". What a nightmare!

Get to the library and read the papers, then the plot will either unravel or you'll find you have a case. Good luck!

lincroft1710

1991 prices were much higher than those in 1995, £60K in 95 would have indicated min £80K in 91 in the area I live. As regards actual house prices, the VOA has details of 99.9% of house sales in the country, but rules of confidentiality restrict disclosure of such information except where a valid appeal against a CT band has been made.

slummymummyof3

I have contacted a local estate agent and asked if they have archived information on property prices in my road for 1991 prices. They were very positive when I popped in and cheekily asked them (probably glad to have something to occupy their time in the current market situation). They phoned me back today, but unfortunately I was at work so will have to wait until I can speak to them tomorrow to see if I have any success with them.

I bought my first property in June 1991 @ £41,500 and 7 years later I still sold it for less than I paid for it.