The City of Nanaimo gave 35 property owners an opportunity to pay their delinquent property taxes rather than lose their properties in a tax sale auction Monday.
Properties are put on the auction block when owners are found to be in default for three years, said Brian Clemens, but a two-year old policy by city council allows the city to bid on the properties to protect them from other bidders.
If there are no bidders, the city automatically assumes possession. Only a handful of private bids were made at the sale, all of them unsuccessful.
“We do that because it provides additional options for the original owner to redeem their property,” said Clemens. “It makes it less likely that a property will transfer because our objective in all of this is to collect property taxes.”
Delinquent homeowners are sometimes given an option to pay through installments or council can agree to extend the payment period.
“To that it has been successful in the past because we’ve collected our taxes and nobody lost their property,” said Clemens, adding that 35 properties is on par with other years.
The annual tax sale was held at city hall Monday morning.
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