Losing Your Home Due To Unpaid Property Tax Is Rare

If you do not pay your property tax within two years in BC, a municipality must sell your property to collect owed taxes. This tax sale is not optional. Going to a tax sale is very rare, and in Langley City, it normally results from the City being unable to contact a property owner over multiple years.

Under BC law, a tax sale is an auction that must occur at 10:00 am on the last Monday in September in a municipality's council chamber. A municipality sells the property to the highest bidder. Even after the tax sale, the original property owner has a year to pay their taxes and get their property back. A year after the property sale, if the original property owner still doesn't pay taxes, the property is transferred to the successful bidder. The City receives the amount owed in taxes, fees and interest, with the remainder going to the original property owner.

The short of it is that you have up to three years from when your taxes are due before you could lose your property. Again, it is extremely rare for someone to lose their property due to a tax sale in Langley City. City staff work hard to connect with someone before they lose their property.

The BC Ombudsperson in 2021 issued a report on a tax sale in Penticton called "A BID FOR FAIRNESS: How $10,000 in Property Tax Debt Led to a Vulnerable Person Losing Their Home." As the title of this report suggests, Ms. Wilson, a senior, lost her home due to a tax sale, and the Ombudsperson found it was due to unclear and inadequate communication by a municipality.

To prevent a Ms. Wilson situation from happening in our community, Langley City Council passed a motion last Monday to authorize the City's "Director of Corporate Services or his or her designate be appointed to bid on behalf of the municipality for any City of Langley Tax Sales." If a property ever went to a tax sale in our community, the City would bid for it to recover any property taxes owed and work to transfer it back to the original owner without evicting the original owner if it is a residential property.

Again, while someone losing their property due to a tax sale is extremely rare, this authorization from Council adds another layer of protection.

Please note that there was previously a picture of a house in Langley City. I was alerted that some folks thought it was a picture of a house owned by someone who didn't pay their property taxes on time. I want to be clear that the homeowner has always paid their property taxes on time. I regrets my decision to use that picture as its use has caused embarrassment and concern to this homeowner. I apologize.

I have replaced the picture with an example of a house in Wellington, New Zealand.