Just checked and my values are available on HCAD. My personal home is up by only $4k, so I won't protest that. But my rental house went up $20k!! Based on my approximated % calculation of prior year tax, my tax bill will go up $750. F@ck that! A personal friend (aka Sources) informed me that HCAD is looking to really increase values this year, since they did not do it last year in respect to those affected by Hurricane Harvey. So they want to recoup revenue that should have been earned last year. Who's protesting? Are you using a company? If so which company? I've never protested and want to be prepared
Another question: I've heard in the past that HCAD can not increase the appraisal values by greater than 10% in a single year. Is this true? If so, the value increase for me is quite a bit over that amount for my rental house. That should be another reason for me to protest
The 10% cap only applies if the property is your residential homestead. There is no cap on non-homestead property.
My value dropped almost 25% because of Harvey and since I refuse to open the door to the appraisal folks at HCAD they have no evidence that I've fixed it up (I've improved the **** out of it). It went up 3% this year lol.
I've heard someone else recommend O'Connor as well. Can I ask how much they charged you, or at least what they base their fee on?
Ok so in my example in my OP where i approximate my tax bill to be increased by $750 this year, if (and a big if) they are able reduce my house value back to last years value then I will have to pay O'Conner $375. So I'm saving $375? I know its the cost of doing business, but just seems kinda steep. I need to learn to do this myself
The company I used to work with back in the day and then me personally used them extensively and they were excellent. Glad to hear they're still doing their thing, good people. eta: I will add that they were dealing with multiple properties, so I may have gotten different service than a single homeowner.
So mine is appraised at a price that's 4.57% higher than what I paid for the house in the middle of last year. New build. What are the odds that I can challenge it and get it back down closer to the original purchase price?
odds are you might get it reduced to purchase price since it's a new build and unless you got a sweet deal a similar build would be the same as yours.
My market value went up 18%. Appraised up 10% (again). 10% for the last 5 years. Gone from $159K to $234K. I've been signed up with O'Connor before, but never saw anything out of it. Couldn't even get them to respond to me. I'm going to try Jubally.com. They give you all the comparables and you go do the presentation yourself. It costs $75. Figure worth a try.
Looks like mine went up 7.5%. But it went up last year about the same amount despite Harvey, so that's kind of bullcrap.
