What many homeowners do not know is that there is clear data to show that homeowners actually do win more often and save more money than property tax protest companies do. The question is: why? While we can’t know EXACTLY why in every case, we can deduce the general reason.
What we know is that the appraiser companies have the same limitations as the rest of us – if they work 8 hours a day Monday – Friday, with about 4 holidays from April 1 to Aug 29. That’s ~105 days X 8 hours a day = 840 hours, in round numbers. At 4 hours on your case (including the preparation, waiting at the appraisal board, making the case, etc), that’s 205 clients per assessor for the year. To make $60K/year – without including other costs, they need to save each of those clients roughly $30K (assuming 1% of the market value is charged).
That math does not work, as we know from the above linked article that the assessors save perhaps $16K – about 1/2 of the target. The only way they can make these figures work is by having more clients and cutting the time spent per case – so you’re getting less than 2 hours of attention.
But it gets worse – their salaries are $60K on average, not including overhead and costs – so they need $100K to get that $60K (if not more). So they need to serve even more customers per assessor. We’re down to a ballpark of an hour.
In that hour, no matter how good they are, they can’t just: a) understand the neighborhood, all the houses and their conditions, b) write a report up, c) make the case to the board (up to 15 min per case!) and take care of all the other tasks if they were doing this manually. And people aren’t machines – they check Facebook, watch Youtube, etc. Actually looking at your property well is just too slow! So, they HAVE to default to what the counties do – mass appraisal models that by definition don’t really take into account YOUR specific property or the neighbors’. This way, they can spend all day at the board and spend just 20-25 minutes or so on your case – which makes this a profitable business for them.
The problem is, if they don’t take the fact that your neighbor’s house sold last year because it was remodeled, and the county is revaluing your house even though your house WASN’T remodeled, how can they win? The only way to do this is to get pictures and evidence by driving past the property (pictures online may not be accurate as well), which, again, takes TIME.
This explains why agents don’t do well – but why do homeowners win more than property tax protest companies? Because homeowners know the area and spend the time. To give a personal example, I have 4 properties (3 vacant lots and 1 house), so it took 80+ hours last year for me to feel confident of a win – but I did win over 36% off the county’s price to below “market value”. Still, the amount of TIME it took was why I developed this software – to be able to make my appeals faster.
The question is: is $49 worth saving nights and weekends of your life, while potentially improving your odds to win and the savings? What if you could spend just 2-3 hours entering info and have a rock-solid appeal? For the first time, spend just $49 to enter the important details of your property and the neighbors – QUICKLY. Your data is used to generate a report that actually makes sense – taking things like, for example, the county comparing totally undeveloped land against a fully cleared lot with a concrete foundation and a half-built house (yes, it happened to me!) into account. Which is another reason that homeowners win more than property tax protest companies – I had the time to look into each property and realize “This does not make sense!” I hope you can join me and help improve this software to save yourself time.
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