South African start-up Gatvol AI is using agentic artificial intelligence together with machine learning and large language models to help homeowners object to inflated property valuations that lead to them pay rates higher than the fair market value of their property demands.
“There are two issues here that we are trying to solve: one is that people don’t understand how these values are derived, when the municipalities do so and what rights people have,” said Jordan Borer, co-founder and chief financial officer at Gatvol AI.
“The second issue is that people don’t know how to object if they think their property has been incorrectly valuated.”
According to Borer, municipalities perform property valuations in two distinct processes. The first, called a general valuation roll, occurs every four years. During the general valuation cycle, homeowners have a window of about three months following the municipality’s valuation of their property to object the quantum, with reasons. This is when valid objections have the most chance of being assessed and responded to, said Borer.
The other form municipal valuations can take, said Borer, is the supplementary valuation. Supplementary valuation rolls are meant to update to the main valuation roll by reflecting changes to properties such as new developments, alterations or errors that occurred after the main roll was published. This process also allows for objections and appeals but, according to Borer, there are no legislative stipulations binding municipalities to specific timelines for responding to homeowners for supplementary valuations. This makes the likelihood of a successful objection through a supplementary valuation particularly low.
Fair market value
Gatvol AI uses a combination of data points to make its fair-market-value determination. The sale prices of the most recently sold properties in a given neighbourhood are one of the most important inputs in this calculation. Beyond the fair-market-value determination, Gatvol AI uses large language models to fill out the paperwork required for a homeowner to file an objection with their municipality. The web-based application allows users to check that the information the AI populates into the form is correct before filing it.
As the business grows, Gatvol AI aims to focus on other processes where individuals or businesses interact with government. It wants to streamline these processes in much the same way that the valuation objection process has been optimised.
Elan Novick, Gatvol co-founder and chief technology officer, said using an agentic AI system means the business can scale to handle many more queries without the need to add more staff, making it easier to scale operations.
Gatvol’s customers save money in either one or two ways, depending on their specific circumstances. The most direct way is through the elimination of legal fees that would otherwise accompany a valuation objection application. Borer said legal fees can range between R5 000 and R20 000 depending on the complexity of the application, and Gatvol is 50-80% cheaper than that.
The second way depends on whether the homeowner’s objection is successful or not. If it is, their properties valuation decreases, meaning the rates they pay also go down, leading to savings. Borer said Gatvol’s experience is that, on average, municipal valuations are inflated by about 20% compared to fair market value. Homeowners with a large difference in these rates have the most to gain from filing an objection.
“We had a customer who in 2021, when Ekurhuleni released the municipal roll, had a property valued at R4-million that the municipality then raised to R13-million. He didn’t object at the time because he missed the objection window, but he applied later on for a re-evaluation and the municipality rejected it,” said Borer.
Unfair burden
He said cash-strapped municipalities often see inflated municipal rates as way to improve their revenues. This practice adds an unfair tax burden on homeowners whose civic duty is to pay their rates according to the fair market value of the properties they own – and not more, he added.
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“We called our platform Gatvol because gatvol is generally how people feel about these things. Nobody wants to be cheated. Everyone is proud and patriotic, but we think that municipal valuations should be aligned to the actual value of the property and not what some municipality deems it to be,” said Borer. – © 2025 NewsCentral Media
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