Commercial Fact Sheet
What you need to know: The basics
- The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) values over 166,000 commercial properties in Ontario.
- Commercial properties include small office buildings, food service, small retail, restaurants, auto dealerships, and large format retail.
How we assess commercial properties
- Commercial properties are typically valued using the cost approach, however both direct comparison and income approaches may be used, depending on the characteristics of the property and its use. Learn more about our approaches to value.
- In the GTA, where there are an abundance of sales, we use the direct comparison approach to establish current value assessments of commercial properties.
- In the case of a multi-tenanted commercial property, we use the income approach to calculate its value.
About MPAC
The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) is an independent, not-for-profit corporation funded by all Ontario municipalities, and is accountable to the Province, municipalities and property owners. Our role is to value and classify all properties in Ontario in compliance with the Assessment Act and regulations set by the Government of Ontario.
- We are the largest assessment jurisdiction in North America, assessing more than five million properties in Ontario, representing $3 trillion in property value.
- Our assessments provide the foundation that municipalities use to calculate the property taxes needed to pay for community services.
- Our assessors are trained experts in the field of valuation and apply appraisal industry standards and best practices.
- Our assessments and data have met international standards of accuracy and are relied upon by banks, insurance companies and the real estate industry.
