We've successfully appealed our property assessment. We purchased our house a month before we got the property assessment, and yet they assessed the property value at $100K + more than what we paid.
If you contact any realtor (including CP's realtor Realtor 1 Travis Munroe), they can provide you with a list of recently sold in the area. We compiled a list of similar properties based on square footage, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, and area.
We used a $/sqft metric to bring to the appeal meeting. The City argued that the $/sqft metric was not a valid metric, as there were other variables that were considered. I believe they also took into account the lot size, the rating of the property (good, average, etc) among others.
In the end, the appeal board agreed that since we just bought the house a month prior, the best representation of "fair market value" was the price that we paid, so they reduced our property value to what we paid, which resulted in $400 savings in our property tax for the year.
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