Alan Spacek
Chair, MPAC Board of Directors
From the Board Chair
We are proud to connect property owners, municipal representatives, and business sectors with the property information and insights they need to make informed decisions.
We are also keen to share our knowledge and experience with municipalities to support communities across the province. As Ontario evolves, we promise to continuously advance, modernize and revolutionize our assessment technologies and techniques to provide even more value to Ontarians.
Alan Spacek
Chair, MPAC Board of Directors
Nicole McNeill
MPAC President and Chief Administrative Officer
From the President and CAO
At MPAC, we know that for many Ontarians, their home is their single biggest investment. We also recognize the significant role we play in empowering property owners and municipalities with our property data and insights.
We remain committed to ensuring municipalities have the tools they need to effectively manage their tax base. We are also ready to support the Government of Ontario’s review of the property assessment and taxation system and share the government’s interest in ensuring transparency and fairness for all participants. Ontario’s property assessment system is a world leader and we will work with our partners to keep it that way.
Nicole McNeill
MPAC President and Chief Administrative Officer
Planning ahead to meet the evolving needs of our partners
Ontario’s property landscape is constantly evolving. Since 2022, we have captured more than $42 billion in new assessment. This will generate millions of dollars in new revenue for municipalities, and marks a record-breaking year for MPAC.
Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario
As Ontario continues to grow, our work never ends. We are always valuing new construction and studying market activity, so that we can provide revenue streams and market intelligence to the municipalities we support.
In doing so, our commitment to elevating the municipal experience is always top of mind. As we close a chapter with our final delivery of the Preliminary List of Electors and post-enumeration products, we are looking forward to the innovative ways we can bring more value to Ontario’s municipalities.
Whether we are developing new software and tools to serve you more efficiently, educating taxpayers and municipal councils, or collaborating with municipal staff on upcoming projects, we are here for you.
A snapshot of our accomplishments in 2023
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million+
inventory of properties maintained
0
sales transactions processed
0
property inspections
0
severances and consolidations processed
0
building permits processed
0
%+
of new assessment added within one year of occupancy
0
calls from property owners, emails and chats
0
Requests for Reconsideration
0
appeals closed
All stats are as of October 27, 2023.
Empowering municipalities
Educating new and existing municipal staff and elected officials
As a leader in your community, property owners may come to you with questions about their assessment. We developed a suite of municipal resources, including our Property Assessment and Taxation Toolkit, to help you provide the answers they need.
We also continued to provide timely updates to municipal elected and nonelected staff through our monthly webinar series and our monthly municipal newsletter, ‘InTouch’.
Following Municipal and School Board Elections in October 2022, we offered council orientation sessions to newly formed councils. These engagements served as an opportunity to discuss MPAC’s services and explore the relationship between property values and taxes, and hear about local priorities.
In total, our Municipal and Stakeholder Relations team met and collaborated with municipal staff and elected officials more than 1,860 times in 2023 and responded to 99.5% of municipal enquiries within the time periods outlined in our Service Level Agreement with municipalities.
5
webinars
8
webinar attendees
8
InTouch recipients
8
municipal engagements
8
toolkit
page views
8
council orientation meetings
Connecting with our municipal partners
MPAC was on the move this year, with representatives from our Municipal and Stakeholder Relations team actively engaging in 15 events and conferences across the province - from the Northwestern Ontario Municipal Association (NOMA) conference in Thunder Bay to the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) conference in London to the Ontario Municipal Administrators’ Association (OMMA) conference in Blue Mountains.
As a speaker, exhibitor and attendee at these events, we shared organizational updates and operational highlights. More importantly, we had the opportunity to engage in meaningful discussions with attendees and gain insights on municipal priorities that position us to work together to build stronger communities.
Partnerships in Action:
Strengthening Relationships with the OBIAA and their BIA Members
In addition to attending the municipal conference circuit, our Municipal and Stakeholder Relations team connected with leaders from the BIA and municipal community at the 2023 Ontario Business Improvement Area Association (OBIAA) Conference in London earlier this year.
The OBIAA is instrumental in building strong relationships with their member network, and we are looking forward to the various ways we can work together to support communities across Ontario.
“Working with MPAC to access locational data for our BIA members to support sound decision making is essential to their success. BIAs tend to be small organizations with very limited staff capacity, so offering trusted information to help them build solid strategies and reach members in their communities is indispensable.”
Kay Matthews
Executive Director, OBIAA
Sharing our expertise to help Ontarians understand the changing property landscape
At MPAC, we maintain Ontario’s property inventory – the size, age, and value of every parcel in the province. Changes in this inventory tell us a lot about how Ontarians live, work and play – and how those trends may be changing.
Port Hope, Ontario
Each year, we process about 300,000 new building permits for properties of all types. Our understanding of this data enables us to identify trends in various permit categories across the province.
This year, we looked at residential home improvement building permit trends in 2022 from across Ontario, which revealed:
For the first time in three years, Ontario saw the number of residential building permits drop after reaching all-time highs during the pandemic.
Last year, more than 108,000 building permits were issued across Ontario for new development as well as home improvement, representing an approximate 11.6% decrease from the previous year.
Despite the decrease, permit numbers exceeded 2019 levels by 22%.
“In 2023, people are starting to gravitate back to experiences and travel. Coupled with the fact that the cost of borrowing has increased with higher interest rates, we’re seeing fewer permits issued, signaling a shift in priorities.”
Carmelo Lipsi
Vice-president, Valuation & Customer Relations and Chief Operating Officer
2022 Residential Building Permit trends by region
Check out the full 2022 Building Permit
Insights campaign here.
Modernizing our products and services
We strive to offer innovative products and services that can help municipalities make important decisions about the communities they serve. This is why we are relentlessly modernizing and reinvigorating our products and services. Here are initiatives we implemented in 2023 to better support municipalities:
Belleville, Ontario
Introducing the new Data Sharing Services Agreement
In collaboration with a Municipal Working Group within our Municipal Liaison Group and municipal legal teams, we created a new Data Sharing and Services Agreement (DSSA) to modernize our data-sharing relationship and provide greater clarity for municipalities.
Thanks to their active participation in this process, we have successfully updated and consolidated several existing
MPAC-municipal agreements, including our SLA, Licensing Agreements and Data Use Terms and Conditions, which will enable us to offer a flexible framework for future enhancements.
The new DSSA will help address concerns over data sharing, municipal document protection, and obligations. It will also clarify the permitted use of municipal data by MPAC, MPAC data by municipalities, and the scope of use for MPAC products, as well as external distribution.
Launching our New Building Permit Dashboard
Designed to provide greater insight on new assessment, our new Building Permit Dashboard in Municipal Connect enables municipal staff members to review all building permits MPAC has received from their municipality.
The dashboard enhances transparency by providing a better understanding of the building permit’s status and fosters communication between municipalities and MPAC throughout the building permit review process.
Milton, Ontario
“The introduction of the Building Permit Dashboard in Municipal Connect represents a significant advancement for municipalities. It serves as a robust tool that not only simplifies the assessment data exchange but also effectively illustrates the connection between supplementary assessments and the relevant building permits. This pioneering solution fosters transparency, provides rapid and valuable insights to frontline personnel, and bolsters the municipality’s ability to address supplementary billing inquiries.”
Steven Radenic
supervisor, Assessment base management, Town of Milton
Navigating our new e-permitting pilot program
We developed our new digital permitting program in partnership with Licensing Automation System (LAS), the Association of Municipalities of Ontario’s (AMO) business division.
Collaborating with municipalities to digitize their building permit process provides MPAC with access to electronic building plans, allowing for more efficient data collection.
To date, nearly 340 municipalities have submitted digital building plans electronically, and over 31% of all plans are being received electronically. This means that we have the ability to capture new assessment 150 days earlier, which means new revenues for municipalities sooner.
“The implementation of the e-permitting pilot program marked a significant step forward for the Town and its customers, with improved efficiency and an enhanced, user-friendly experience.
We are grateful to our partners for their support and continuous efforts to implement technology solutions that benefit all stakeholders."
Marnie Cluckie
Chief Administrative Officer, Town of Niagara-on-the-Lake
Enhancing Realty Tax Class/Realty Tax Qualifier codes to suit Ontario’s growing property inventory
With the introduction of the Small-Scale On-Farm Business subclass and more recently the Small Business subclass, we identified that in order to address any additional legislative or regulatory changes, the existing Realty Tax Class (RTC) and Realty Tax Qualifiers (RTQ) codes would need to be expanded.
Following extensive consultations with municipalities, Reamined, product vendors, and other impacted stakeholders, we are proactively updating our systems to increase the RTC and RTQ codes from one character each, to two, to accommodate any future legislative or regulatory changes.
The changes to impacted products will come into effect in 2024.
Kingston, Ontario
“By collaborating with our municipal partners and their tax vendors ahead of time, updates to the RTC/RTQ codes can be seamlessly ingested into municipal tax systems.”
Travis Merkley
Account Manager, Municipal and Stakeholder Relations
Developing a new Corporate Data Strategy
Aligned with our commitment to developing a new Corporate Data Strategy, over the span of 12 weeks, we conducted extensive municipal and taxpayer discovery sessions to better understand the needs of our partners and customers.
With the invaluable support of the Association of Municipalities Ontario (AMO), we engaged with Ontario municipalities through surveys, interviews, in-depth focus groups and a live polling session at the Federation of Northern Ontario Municipalities (FONOM) Conference in the spring, which helped identify challenges and opportunities that could feed into MPAC’s overall data strategy.
The feedback obtained has provided us with a thorough understanding of the various perspectives and experiences within the municipal sector, thanks to the participation of a broad and diverse range of participants, and the valuable insight that we have obtained will allow us to grow and improve as an organization.
Whether this means expanding our products to meet the varying requirements of municipal partners better or developing clearer guidelines for acceptable uses of MPAC data, we are committed to finding solutions that will meet municipalities’ evolving needs.
We look forward to sharing more information with municipalities as we work to finalize the strategy in early 2024.
Corporate Data Strategy Sessions at a glance:
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surveys distributed to municipal staff and Heads of Council across Ontario
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municipal survey participants, in collaboration with AMO
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focus group participants in the Western Ontario warden caucus
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focus group participants in the Eastern Warden caucus
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municipal interviews conducted
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live polling session
at FONOM
Thunder Bay, Ontario
Prioritizing property owners
Unlocking the potential of AboutMyPropertyTM
MPAC’s AboutMyProperty is a powerful portal that empowers property owners to get free access to the property details we have on file and how we assessed their property, review assessment and sales information for properties in their neighbourhood, and find information on what to do if they disagree with their assessment.
To enhance the property owner experience, we recently improved functionalities within AboutMyProperty, including:
- A new online portal to collect school support information electronically.
- A new portal for commercial property owners to submit their Property Income and Expense Returns.
- Clearer communication around updating property information and the Request for Reconsideration (RfR) process.
- New ways to browse neighbourhoods, with advanced filters.
We were honoured to feature AboutMyProperty in the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario (IPC)’s 2023 Transparency Showcase, a virtual exhibit featuring innovative and impactful transparency projects by public institutions.
Grimsby, Ontario
Exploring new avenues for customer engagement
To increase communication with property owners as MPAC works to keep our property data up to date, we introduced new ‘Contact Us’ and ‘Inspection’ Notices earlier this year.
The notices reflect feedback from property owners, and answer some of the most common questions we receive. The new notices include key pieces of information such as:We also added one extra mailing of Property Assessment Change Notices (PACNs) in April 2023, bringing the total number of PACN extracts to eight, up from seven in 2022, to ensure we are providing property owners and municipalities with prompt information.
To support the ongoing education of property owners, we extended our Property Assessment and Taxation social media campaign, in addition to launching our “First-time Homeowners' Hub” on mpac.ca, which was designed specifically for first-time property owners to help them navigate Ontario’s comprehensive property assessment and taxation system.
- Why the property owner is receiving the notice.
- What the next steps will be for the property owner.
- What happens if the property owner does not respond.
- Where to go for more information.
Finally, the ongoing collaboration between MPAC and Ontario’s municipalities has been fundamental to prioritizing the needs of Ontarians. By working together to resolve intricate property owner enquiries, providing a united front during municipal information sessions, and planning for the future, we are empowering property owners, together.
Rice Lake and Trent River, Ontario
Partnerships in Action:
In the Field with our Northern Ontario Team
Earlier this year, Thunder Bay Account Manager, Sharla Knapton, joined Kristen Oliver, Councillor, Westfort Ward, City of Thunder Bay, at an information session in her ward.
Partnering for this session gave residents a full picture of how Ontario’s property assessment and taxation system works, including MPAC’s role, how we assess properties, the relationship between assessment and taxation and where to go for questions or concerns about their assessment.
“I value the open communication and great working relationship I have with my Account Manager at MPAC. Gaining a thorough understanding of MPAC’s role, and assessment and taxation in general, enables me to provide valuable information to the community I serve. It was a pleasure having MPAC attend my recent ward meeting, where we worked together to educate residents and dispel assessment and taxation myths.”
Kristen Oliver
Councillor, Westfort Ward, City of Thunder Bay
Hamilton, Ontario
Looking ahead
As the Province’s review of the assessment and taxation system begins, we will continue to evolve the ways we work to deliver critical new assessment to municipal assessment rolls.
We will also remain steadfast in supporting municipalities through regular updates, insights, and opportunities for collaboration, as we work together to improve the communities we live and work in.
“My sincerest thank you to our municipal partners for your continued support. I look forward to our ongoing collaboration as we work together to create and develop products that meet your evolving needs.”
Mary Dawson-Cole
Director, Municipal and stakeholder relations
Orangeville, Ontario