New Build House Council Tax Appeal

JamesSouthend

Hi Everyone

We live in a 2015 built house and we're Council Tax band G, as are the majority of houses on the estate. We've had a lot of back and forth with the VOA with similar local properties outside of our estate sitting at Council Tax band E. Our requests for review (6 separate enquiries) always included 5-10 comparable (IMO) properties complete with their address (sometimes included an accurate floorplan if one was included on a recent sale listing), original purchase date and current council tax banding. Each time we had the same response "Our records show that the list of properties you provided are all smaller than your own...". I ended up driving round to these houses and confirmed they were all larger than our own, even having a nice chat with a couple of the owners. The response from the VOA didn't change until the last one, in July, mentioned I could obtain a copy of my records so I could see the information held for my property used for comparison.

We sent off our Council Tax Bill with the request and the response back came in a couple of days...."Area - 233 Square Metres" caught my eye. The external dimensions of our house are 8.5m x 7.5m and 2 storeys so something had gone wrong somewhere. We had a Help to Buy Equity Loan which we had cleared when we remortgaged and needed a RICS Survey as part of the process which noted the house at 125 square metres. 

It's no wonder the VOA thought our property wasn't comparable to the many examples provided, they must have wondered why someone living in such a mansion would be bothering. 

Appeal went in on the 18th of July and we're still waiting but the service standard advised was 90 working(!) days so we're not chasing. 

My questions:
Have you any idea who provides the information to the VOA for assessment?
There's a similar housing estate built 2 years after ours and a lot of the properties there are Band G too, am I right to presume that there's a benchmark set, potentially on our estate, and it carries over to other newly built properties from then?

A colleague from work has just moved into a newly built 4 bedroom semi-detached house, around the same internal space as ours, a few miles up the road and it's a Band G too which seems mad! 

Apologies for the "text dump". I haven't had anyone to talk to about it

James

lincroft1710

The VOA usually inspect and physically measure properties themselves. Sometimes information is obtained from builder's plans and developer's estate plans. It is quite probable that the VOA will base bands of new builds on the bands of neighbouring recent builds of a similar size. However only the VOA can say exactly what they did in these cases.


I would say that there being such an apparent size difference is rare, but does suggest there is a major problem somewhere

JamesSouthend

Thank you for the response! Makes sense

Every new housing estate in my local area (and there's now 3 or 4 sizeable estates within 5 miles or so) are majority Band G which seems crazy to me. We'll see what the Council Tax Band Appeal comes back with