Property Protest Companies
Whether it’s the home you live in or one you’ve purchased as an investment, today’s rising property taxes are the bane of all property owners, and there is no end in sight. Ever-increasing property taxes squeeze household budgets and reduce the return on investment property. What’s the solution? Protesting the property tax appraisal for your home or rental property! You can do it yourself, especially the first year of ownership, but often the best results come from hiring a company that specializes in reducing property tax appraisals and as a result reducing property taxes. A property tax appraisal protest company can help you reduce the property tax appraised value of your home or rental property to the lowest possible amount, reducing the total property taxes you owe each year.
At Lifestyles Unlimited, part of our road map to creating wealth and passive income and becoming a millionaire real estate investor is protesting your properties tax appraisal every year to keep them at the lowest possible levels. We teach you how to do it yourself, or successfully work with a property tax appraisal protest company. Read More
What They Are
Property tax appraisal protest companies do exactly what it sounds like, they protest the property tax appraised value of your property to reduce your property taxes. Both residential and commercial property owners should protest their property tax appraisals each year. Each state has a specific procedure for protesting the property tax appraisal of your propcheaerty. Professional property tax appraisal protest companies are experts on the law and the local procedures for appealing your property tax appraisal for you.
Reasons to Protest
Why should you protest your taxes? It’s simple, you could be paying much less in taxes than you currently do, which leaves you with a lot more money in your pockets. When it comes to investment properties, it is even more important, because it gives you a larger return on your investment. Even if it’s your personal property, who wants to pay more in taxes than they need to? You can use the extra money for other, more useful things than taxes. You can save money and improve the return on your real estate investments by protesting your property tax appraised value each year.
Why a Property Protest Company?
Once you know it’s possible and will save you money, of course you want to protest your property taxes. But you may not want to do it yourself. The property valuation and appeals process used by your local appraisal district is often convoluted and difficult for property owners to navigate alone. A company of professionals who protest property tax appraisals for a living have the expertise, insider knowledge, and access to a range of resources and technology that you don’t. As a result, they are often more successful in reducing your property tax bill, than you would be going it alone. Finally, appealing your property tax appraised value takes time and effort. You can save yourself that hassle and time by leaving it to the professionals instead.
How to Protest
If you own a property and want to pay less in property taxes, Lifestyles Unlimited can teach you how to do it yourself, and educate you on when you should contact a property tax appraisal protest company to do it for you. Whether you’re renting out the property or it’s your own home, you could be saving a lot of money by protesting your property tax appraised value each year.
Property Tax Evaluation & Tax Protesting in the Wake of Covid-19
We answer your most pressing questions about protesting your property taxes during the pandemic.
Real Estate Investor
Today, I’ve got Glenn Goodrich of Goodrich Realty Consulting. Tell us about yourself and Goodrich Realty Consulting.
& Property Tax
Goodrich Realty Consulting
Official Lifestyles Unlimited Vendor
Well, it’s a family business. It was originally just an appraisal company, so we’re very familiar with real estate evaluation. We’ve expanded our services from appraisal to property tax, but we specialize in evaluation. A few years ago I invented a tool called Property Tax IO, which helps homeowners produce evidence to dispute the value of their property price.
Can you tell us a little bit more about Property Tax IO?
Our perspective has always been: how do you maintain credibility with real estate valuation? The property tax industry has evolved into a system-based fairness assessment. For example, they’re not just going to lower your value because you filed an appeal. You have to give them proof for that. With single family residential that usually comes in the form of a couple different methods. One is disputing the condition of your property, and the appraisal district has data points that they track to describe the condition of your property. What we specialize in is the second method, which is recent sales analysis. Using recent sales in the area that are similar to your property, we adjust the valuation to something more in line with your home than what the appraisal district may have come up with.
Excellent. So, tell me what’s going on with property tax valuations right now with Texas counties considering Covid-19?
Everything is delayed this year. We don’t even know what’s going on with notice values yet, but we do expect property tax values to increase because you’re valuing the property as of January 1st of this year and we really didn’t start to see the impacts of Covid-19 until March. So, this is going to be a really important year to protest your property taxes because we do expect values to increase and that’s going to hit us with the tax bills during the fall when we could be in a full blown recession.
Click the image above after your read to get more helpful info for protesting your property taxes.
Understood. Let’s talk about another important piece of this, which is tax protest deadlines because those have changed. What are the changes?
So, normally you could say in general that May 15th is the deadline to file an appeal. But, all the appraisal districts are going to be delayed this year. The law actually states that your deadline to file an appeal is 30 days after the notice of appraisal is sent to you. So, we get that in the mail from the appraisal district and you have 30 days from the date they send that to file the appeal. But, it’s going to be all over the board this year and it’s not going to be May 15th like it would normally be for most counties.
So, this Property Tax IO software that you developed, I understand there’s two parts to it?
Exactly. One option for using this software is to do it yourself with guidance from a coach or a mentor on our team who will help you through the appeal process. The other option is that you can just hire us outright to handle everything for you.
Let’s talk about evidence gathering within Property Tax IO, how does how’s it work?
So, we’ve actually got an express report, and that’s just our automated report that spits out an analysis that’s similar to how the appraisal district would do it. You’ll have great evidence in a matter of minutes from signing up and that’s all automated. So, you can just download that evidence and upload it into the online appeal and it’s ready for you to go.
Can you speak to the difference between a personal residence and rental property when it comes to property tax valuation?
If it’s your personal residence, you do have what’s called a homestead cap on it where they can only increase the value 10% every year. I’m sure a lot of your readers are investors and have rental properties. They won’t be able to put a homestead on those. So, the value will go up however much the appraisal district wants it to go up every year.
If you’re an investor, it can be, depending on where you are, 20% to 25% of your rental revenue. Also, it can be kind of hidden since it’s in your mortgage and you’re not really paying attention to it, but it’s there and it’s a huge chunk of change. For something you can actually impact, like when filing a protest, it’s something you should be doing every year.
Also, it’s not as complicated as it sounds. I do it every year on every property I own. It’s standard operating procedure. Our members protest their property taxes because if not, the counties are just going to raise it, and we’re not getting a say in that. Let’s talk about the process because I want folks to understand, if you’ve never filed an appeal before or a protest, once you go through the process, it’s not as difficult as it seems.
So, you get your notice of appraised value and you can go to your appraisal district website or you can go to our website, and we’ll have instructions on how to do that with each appraisal district. Once you file the appeal with the appraisal district and you submit your evidence, you can sit back and wait for an offer from them. They’ll either tell you we can reduce the value, or we can’t reduce the value. If they can’t reduce the value, you can move on to the formal appraisal review board hearing.
