How to Protest Your Property Taxes (and Use This Tool)

If you've never protested your property taxes before, it can be a bit intimidating. But don't worry! It's actually really easy, especially with the help of this free tool. A few disclaimers, though:

• I'm constantly iterating over this service and would not be surprised if there are better approaches out there to coming up with comps. I'd love any feedback or tips! I can be reached at xwi887lj@anonaddy.me (forwards to my real email)
• Currently this tool is mainly designed for homeowners with single-family detached homes (1 building on the land that is all used for living). If this is not you and this tool doesn't fit your needs, drop me a line so I can figure out how update this service for you.

Understanding Your Appraisal

Your appraised value cannot increase by more than 10% of your previous year's appraised value

If it does, you should definitely protest and bring this up. This is a state law.

The appraised value is what you are on the hook for tax-wise.

Don't let the "market" values confuse you in your listing. This is what HCAD "thinks" the property could fetch when trying to sell it, but has no bearing on your property tax

The improvment (~building) value, or the per-square-foot value of this more specifically, is what you can protest

The improvement appraisal is the value of all the "stuff" that's been built ontop of the land itself. This is what you can protest. The land value is what the land itself is worth, and HCAD sets a fixed per-square foot value for this that is consistent at least at neighborhood level.

So, when trying to figure out if you should protest, you need to first determine the improvement appraisal. This is calculated as:

Improvement Value = Total Appraised Value - Land Value

The Protest Process

There are really 3 stages to this:

• Notice of appraisal: if you do nothing, you just accept the appraisal. Otherwise, HCAD will give you a link to an online portal where you can protest
• Initial protest: Here is your opportunity to provide a short written statement about why the appraisal is unfair. Ideally here is where you list a few solid comparables and explain your reeasoning.
• Initial protest response: HCAD will come back to you with either an acceptance of your protest, out-right rejection of your protest, or new appraisal offer. If you get a new appraisal offer, you can take it (and your journey is done), or continue to protest.
• Committee protest: if you reject HCAD's response, you then you have the opportunity to present your case before a committee either in person or over an online video call. If you decide to pursue this, you would put together a short presentation that goes into more details about your argument (I hope to help with this in the future!)

Finding Comparables

So you've decdied to protest. Good on ya. There's no reason not to with the help of this tool. First I'll step through my manual approach and then I'll go over what this site's tool covers.

The overall goal here is to find 2-3 properties similar to yours (age, land area, building size, condition, in the geographic area) with lower (improvement/building -- not land) valuations that are lower than yours.

Calculate your improvement value(baseline)

HCAD will give you an appraisal that consists of the total combined value of land + improvement. You need to subtract the land value out of this to get the improvement value, which you will be working with.

Identify your land area value (per square foot)

First: you want to find comps that have the *same* land value (per square foot) -- a.k.a. "Unit Price" in the land section of your HCAD listing. and are in your same neighborhood. That's how this website currently develops its full list of initial comparables (there may be better ways).

Start hunting for comparables

That's what this site is for! But the manual way to do this (or at least how I do this is by):

• Create a spreadsheet to track the properties
• Look at my property on Google maps and identify neighbors in the same neighborhood that look like they have similar-sized homes on similar lot sizes
• Bring up these properties on HCAD and verify they have the same land value per square foot (Unit Price) as you your property
• For each of these, calculate their improvement value by subtracting their appraised value from their land value and record this on the spreadsheet
• Record other details about the property to help measure similarity: age difference of primary building, building square footage size, and lot size are good places to start.
• Record details that might help further your protest case if the property has a lower improvement appraisal than you: like if the property has a pool, is in better condition, or a newer build

Narrowing down your comparables

Now you can look at your spreadsheet (or this site) to identify the best 2 or 3 comparables that seem roughly similar to your property with (reasonably) lower valuations. Sometimes you'll find properties with crazy low valuations, but these should be avoided as they are usually due to an exemption for homeowners over the age of 65 or with a disability.

Calculating your suggested appraisal value for protest

Once you have 2 or 3 of your best comparables, I like to calculate the suggested new appraised value as the average improvement values of those 2/3 comparables and then add that back to my land value. Voila!

Crafting your response to HCAD

HCAD limits the size of length of your response to something like 700 characters. You can use ChatGPT or similar for this (site feature forthcoming!). Just be sure to mention the comparable account numbers (or addresses), their improvement values, and ideally make an argument why yours should be closer to theirs--ideally cases where their building might b a little bigger than yours, be a newer build, have major amenaties you don't have (like a pool), or a better building condition--all despite them having a lower improvement value, etc.

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