Valuation models for property tax in Kampala, Uganda

Property taxation is one of the most significant sources of revenue collected by the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) to fund vital public goods and services in Uganda’s capital. With rapid urban growth and increasing demands on public investment, the city is keen to undertake reforms that can help to improve revenue generation from this source.

As part of ongoing reforms, the KCCA is in the process of procuring an automated property tax system in order to improve ease and reduce costs associated with the entire tax collection process. This system will include the capacity to undertake a mass valuation. In anticipation of this, the KCCA Directorate of Revenue Collection would like to assess different options for mass property valuation, to decide which would be most appropriate for Kampala.

This collaborative project between the KCCA and IGC, and supported by the African Property Tax Initiative, will use property data already collected by the city to test and evaluate three different methods of property valuation with different degrees of complexity and data requirements. The project will involve developing these different models to input into the KCCA’s current eCitie system. It will assess these different methods in terms of:

• The costs and complexity of arriving at values.
• The quality and consistency of valuation: how consistently and how accurately can the different methodologies predict values from property rolls?

These will be compared with results obtained from the current system of valuation based on individual expert assessment.

The project’s results will help to inform the system of mass valuation adopted in Kampala and identify which features play an important role in determining property values. The results will also help inform governments in cities such as Dakar and Freetown undertaking similar reforms to properties valuation methodologies. Through this process, the project also aims to inform improvements in property data collection in future for further research and analysis.