The BC open-data sweep — 28 municipalities scanned, one new measurement
2026-07-19 · wave 29 · ESTIMATE lane · a systematic sweep of BC municipal open-data portals for per-parcel assessment values, prompted by Floyd's question: are we using BC Assessment's own data?
The direct answer first
Every BC number in this project is BC Assessment's data — the question is the channel. BCA's own province-wide per-property products (Data Advice, the Property Values View, the full-province parcel fabric) all sit in the BC Data Catalogue at "Named users" access: licensed products requiring an agreement with BC Assessment, not open downloads. The open channels are (1) municipalities that republish their slice of the roll per-parcel, and (2) the province's Schedule 707 municipal aggregates (used for all 159 municipalities in the BC municipal cut, w16). We do not scrape bcassessment.ca's lookup service; its terms prohibit bulk extraction.
The sweep
Twenty-eight municipalities' portals were scanned (five parallel scanning agents, each finding inspected at the field-list level; every claimed hit re-verified independently before inclusion):
| Result | Municipalities |
|---|---|
| Per-parcel land + improvement values (measurable) | Township of Langley (new, measured below). Previously found: Vancouver (w9), Victoria (w19), Surrey (w28) |
| Cadastral/parcel boundaries only, no values | Kelowna, Kamloops, West Kelowna, Abbotsford, Saanich, Esquimalt, Courtenay, Campbell River, Prince George, Port Coquitlam, Burnaby, Delta, Port Moody, New Westminster |
| Portal exists, no property/assessment datasets | Vernon, Penticton, Squamish, Whistler, Nanaimo, White Rock, Chilliwack, Mission, City of Langley, West Vancouver |
| No open-data portal found | Fort St. John, Central Saanich, Oak Bay |
| Assessment data in a viewer tool only (not bulk) | City of North Vancouver, District of North Vancouver |
One false positive, killed by verification: a scanning agent reported a
"Richmond" parcels dataset with land/dwelling value fields and a 27% land
share — implausible against Surrey's 78% and Vancouver's 75%. Direct
inspection showed State: VA on every record: it was Richmond, Virginia.
The finding died in verification, which is the point of having verification.
(Incidentally: a US east-coast city at a ~27% land share is a nice external
echo of our Quebec cluster — different continent, same loose-supply pattern.)
Langley Township — ninth city measured
The Township (~150k people, Metro Vancouver's southeastern edge, half its land in the Agricultural Land Reserve) publishes a full "Assessments 2026" dataset with BC Assessment's gross land and building values per folio, split by property class. Aggregates via the ArcGIS statistics API, retrieved 2026-07-19:
| Segment | Folios | Land value | Buildings | Land share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All folios | 53,209 | $52.2B | $18.8B | 73.5% |
| Non-strata ("LAND") | 28,153 | $38.7B | $13.4B | 74.3% |
| Strata | 23,487 | $13.2B | $4.9B | 73.0% |
| Residential (class 1) values | — | $51.1B | $18.3B | 73.7% |
Notable: the farm class carries almost no assessed value ($0.06B land)
despite the Township's vast ALR acreage — farm class-9 land is assessed at
use-value, exactly the mechanism mechanism.md §4 adopts for Groundshare
farm charges. Langley is what that policy looks like in production.
What the sweep establishes
- The Metro Vancouver band is now four measurements deep: Surrey 78.4%, Vancouver 75.4%, Langley Township 73.5%, Victoria 69.2% — suburb, core, exurb, island capital, all within nine points. The regional-scarcity reading (w28) holds at every distance from downtown.
- The open-data map of BC is now effectively complete for large municipalities: of the province's ~30 largest, exactly four publish the per-parcel split openly. The rest hold it in viewers, PDFs, or not at all — while BCA sells the full province as a licensed product.
- The campaign ask gains a BC-internal version. BC is the best province for assessment transparency and still: the split for every parcel exists in one database and is public only where a city chooses to republish it. "Open Data Advice" — BCA publishing its annual roll extract as open data — is a one-decision ask with working precedents in four of its own municipalities.
- The licensed route is real but is Floyd's call (money/agreement): Data Advice access, or the cleaner path — universities already hold BCA research extracts, which the Q1/Q2 academic studies would use anyway.
Sources
- BC Data Catalogue — BC Assessment products, all "Named users" access: Data Advice, Property Values View; catalogue API queried 2026-07-19.
- Township of Langley Open Data, "Assessments 2026" (ArcGIS FeatureServer, fields Total_Gross_Land_Assessment / Total_Gross_Building_Assessment and per-class splits), statistics queries retrieved 2026-07-19. https://services5.arcgis.com/frpHL0Fv8koQRVWY/arcgis/rest/services/Assessments_2026/FeatureServer
- Richmond (Virginia) GeoHub Parcels — the false positive, retained as a
verification record:
MailState/State= VA on inspection. https://services1.arcgis.com/k3vhq11XkBNeeOfM/arcgis/rest/services/Parcels/FeatureServer - Per-city portal findings: scan logs summarized in the table above; portals include opendata.kelowna.ca, mydata-kamloops.opendata.arcgis.com, opendata-abbotsford.hub.arcgis.com, data-cityofpg.opendata.arcgis.com, opendata-burnaby.hub.arcgis.com, data.squamish.ca, and counterparts.
- Prior BC measurements:
analysis/vancouver-land-share.md(w9),analysis/victoria-land-share.md(w19),analysis/surrey-land-share.md(w28),analysis/bc-municipal-cut.md(w16). Machine-readable rows:data/land-shares.csv.