PART3: Protesting Property Taxes

So your property taxes might be increasing and you’re not sure why. PART 3

We’re gonna talk about you’re arguing that your market value is too high and evidence that you’re gonna need to provide the appraisal district in order to protest. And I’m giving you examples of what I’ve seen happen and what I’ve successfully done myself.

Now in the state of Texas, there are four reasons that you can protest your property taxes and it’s gonna be market values too high, which is what we’re gonna talk about in this video. And unequal appraisal. I’m gonna do that in another video.

If you’re going to protest based on the market value is too high, which are basically saying is that no buyer would have paid that price for that property January the 1st. So instead of just marching in there and saying nobody would have paid that price you have to take them evidence.

The first thing that you’re going to do is get your hands on some comparable sales. How do you do that you’re going to call a real estate agent. Are you going to talk to you in appraiser not just calling Betty Sue down the street and ask them what they sold their property for you need some actual. True evidence. You’re gonna gather those comparable sales, look at your property and you’re gonna compare them so you can go to them with evidence and say, see these properties sold for this amount. Why is mine valued at this? Remember, those comparable sales cannot be between January to this April. It has to have happened in the previous year.

I did this approach the very first time that I ever protested and it didn’t go so well, but I learned a lot from that. After I protested the first time, I read a lot of Texas property code in the fine print and what? Ended up doing the next time, which is what I would highly suggest to anybody but it is going to cost you a little money, is to hire an independent licensed appraiser. You want to ask them to appraise your property as of January the 1st. So take that appraisal as your evidence and you might not even need to go to an official hearing.

You might be able to walk in with that like I have before. I’ve walked in with it and said this is what an appraisal said that the market value was worth as of January the 1st and they immediately said, ‘Yep OK got it.’ You can provide evidence, which is a very good way that is very successful, is to prove that your property has some items that need to be repaired that could affect the market value. An example would be if you have foundation repair that you need to do. You need to put in new Windows, you need to put on a new roof, on a bunch of rotten wood and peeling paint, things like that. At the very least, take photos of all of that and take it to the appraisal district to see if there’s anything they can do to depreciate the value of your property because it needs those years to go.

A step further would be to get bids for the cost of those improvements to take care of. That way they can know, okay it’s going to cost you $20,000 to put on a new roof. We’ll take that into consideration. Those are the best forms of evidence that you can walk into the appraisal district to have a successful protest. Because whenever I am trying to learn something, I go all in and I sat in some hearings and I learned a lot and I saw a lot of people just going in and complaining about so and so’s neighbor, but they didn’t have any evidence.