The protest deadline is the later of May 15 (16th this year due to weekend) or 30 days after the date of the Notice of Appraised value.

TXTransplant said:

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I submitted two online protests for properties in 77389.

I got an isettle offer on my home today. I only challenged the market value, but they lowered it to what I asked for (based on a sales comp). Market is now at $425k instead of $454k.

So my market value went up 26% instead of 35%.

I submitted a protest to change both market and appraised for a friend who lives in the same zip. Haven't heard back, yet.

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I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Are you just saying that your opinion of value was lower than both market and appraised in this case?

As far as I know, you can only protest market value.

Diggity said:

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TXTransplant said:

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I submitted two online protests for properties in 77389.

I got an isettle offer on my home today. I only challenged the market value, but they lowered it to what I asked for (based on a sales comp). Market is now at $425k instead of $454k.

So my market value went up 26% instead of 35%.

I submitted a protest to change both market and appraised for a friend who lives in the same zip. Haven't heard back, yet.

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I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Are you just saying that your opinion of value was lower than both market and appraised in this case?

As far as I know, you can only protest market value.

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I guess technically, you are just protesting market. But if your new market is lower than your appraised, they will lower the appraised value to match it.

IIRC what I submitted for the second protest that I did for a friend, if they accept the new market value, they will have to lower the appraised to match.

They can and will change your appraised/taxable value. In my protest this year, I protested my market value, but it is still higher than my appraised due to my HE cap and multiple years of protesting. So my appraised didn't change.

Diggity said:

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I feel like you're overthinking it. You're protesting market no matter what.

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Haha…I probably am because I had a convo at lunch with someone who didn't realize 1) there is a market value and 2) that you can protest it. He thought the only number was appraised.

Was talking to my dad about this, there's pretty much no reason to protest. Who cares if you get your increase reduced from 45 to 26, you're still getting dinged this year for 10%. And next year, you'll have to protest again, but still get dinged with the 10%. Looking at HAR, every house near me that's a comp is selling for way more than what I paid for, and this stretches back a year. It's just pointless.

Diggity said:

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that's not really true.

The market can and will slow down at some point, and you want your ceiling to be as low as possible.

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Yep, they will always increase your appraised as much as they can until it reaches market. That's exactly why I protested this year.

If the values are equal (which mine were for a long time), you don't realize this. Until the next year when all of a sudden your appraised jumps up.

That's my point, market is screaming forward so fast that even if you are able to reduce, it won't be less than the 10% homestead cap, and this year will be crazier than last, and the next as well. So as long as it's greater than 10%, it'll keep maxing out.

Or maybe my area is just appreciating extra fast and I don't see anything slowing down for awhile.

They reassess market every year so im missing how reducing market helps me in future years. I assume they aren't raising market value from 2021 by x% to get 2022 market value. Market values are derived from a formula that changes each year based on market conditions.

Is that wrong?

Aggie71013 said:

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They reassess market every year so im missing how reducing market helps me in future years. I assume they aren't raising market value from 2021 by x% to get 2022 market value. Market values are derived from a formula that changes each year based on market conditions.

Is that wrong?

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I've had a few years where market value hasn't gone up. But if your appraised is less than market, they will increase your appraised until they match.

I've also had years where my appraised value hasn't gone up but market did. The first time this happened, I thought it was NBD and ignored it. Then the next year, they raised appraised to match market (and I protested it back down).

Protesting your market value is more of a long-term strategy. And it isn't guaranteed. But if I can prove with a comp that my market value is $425k, why would I want HCAD to value it at $454k? The whole process took maybe 20 min and cost me nothing.

Quote:

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They reassess market every year so im missing how reducing market helps me in future years. I assume they aren't raising market value from 2021 by x% to get 2022 market value. Market values are derived from a formula that changes each year based on market conditions.

Is that wrong?

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Not an expert....but the way I understand it, not necessarily. Most years they do - but some years they will not reassess. Those are the years it helps to have you market value reduced.

It can be beneficial to protest every single year even if there is no hope for reducing the appraised value.

At the end of day, your value is usually heavily influenced by the characteristics that the CAD assigns to your home. And these largely tend to remain unchanged unless something happens (like you pull a permit to remodel, or whatever). Generally speaking, you as the property owner know way more about your home than the district does, because the district is trying to keep track of hundreds of thousands or millions of homes, and has way more limited information about one specific house. Even if its going to take like 5 years for your appraised value to catch up, you will only have one opportunity to win your case in the 5th year, but in years one to four, you have four extra chances to convince the district that their description of your home is not as accurate as it should be, and if fixing the problem doesn't affect the value, they will probably be more likely to change something than in a year where it would make a huge difference. So if you fix something in year one, your value in year five might be lower than would be to start with. But its all speculative, they could also reappraise your whole neighborhood differently in year four. You dont really know.

Well that's my point, there isn't a comp I can find for less than what my current valuation is. I can't 'prove' that my home is less than what they say because all of the homes around me are selling for that, or more.

Will it go up forever? No, of course not, don't be stupid. But at this time, there doesn't feel like anyway to get around the increases.

AlaskanAg99 said:

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Well that's my point, there isn't a comp I can find for less than what my current valuation is. I can't 'prove' that my home is less than what they say because all of the homes around me are selling for that, or more.

Will it go up forever? No, of course not, don't be stupid. But at this time, there doesn't feel like anyway to get around the increases.

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this is a different argument, but in any case, I would encourage you to look at how the CAD appraised your home compared to your immediate neighbors.

In times like this, that's usually the better play.

This is how I protested last year and got a substantial reduction. They had my house in a higher quality bracket than most of my neighbors. Was the 2nd highest PSF out of over 100 homes. Got the quality updated and my market dropped. My appraisal is still unequal as I'm now the second highest PSF at the new quality level and I certainly don't have the second nicest house.

Edit to add that that they had my entire street at a higher quality level than the rest of the neighborhood even though the homes are all roughly equivalent.

I'll look into it tomorrow. I do GIS work so I should be able to map this easily.

I submitted my protest online last week. I originally had a 17.8% increase in my market value (appraised capped at 10%). In my protest I put down my opinion of market value as only being a 4.8% increase, hoping that that would be considered a "reasonable" offer that they would accept.

Well I just got an email offering me a 1% DECREASE in my market value over 2021. Needless to say I have already responded and accepted.

Hopefully some of y'all have similar luck!

got a 1% decrease on our rental too. Original bump was 8%.

I asked for a bit lower but my evidence was somewhat flimsy to get much lower than this, so I took the offer.

I didn't even have any evidence. I declined the iSettle option and requested the in-person meeting. So the only info they had from me was my proposed market value.

This was the same thing I did last year, and got a similar result.

If you declined I settle, how did you get an offer without going in?

What boxes did you check on the "reason for protest"?

AgLA06 said:

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If you declined I settle, how did you get an offer without going in?

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It was first mentioned on here last year or the year before that HCAD was sending out offers to people who had protested. I believe it was initially driven by COVID and trying to resolve a number protests without having to have virtual protest hearings. I just followed the process others had mentioned and got the similar result.

If you go to iSettle, I think you only get one bite at the apple before going to ARB. If you decline iSettle, you get the in-person informal hearing as well as the ARB. When you add in this email option, you can decline the email offer (assuming you get one) and still go to your informal hearing and then the ARB, so potentially 3 shots at arguing your case.

Reason for Protest: Value is over market and/or unequal compared with other properties

I also checked (or didn't check) whatever was required to decline iSettle. I did include my opinion of value which, as noted above, was 5% over 2021 market value.

Got an isettle offer after protesting ourselves and simply sending in the appraisal that was done when we bought the house in Dec. They settled on the value we asked, which was what we paid for it.

Zip code?

77079

that gives me some hope. I'm in the same zip and thought they were going to play hard ball with us.

Submitted mine this afternoon. Fingers crossed.

Anybody had luck with Fort Bend? Put my proposal in today so we will see what happens

Fair warning, we live in a townhouse, and while things have been selling, they haven't been blowing up the way single family homes in the area have. Still, I would have never expected them to offer a decrease over our 2021 value.

Any recommendation on choosing a single ARB member for the formal vs the usual 3 member panel? THis appears to be a new option this year when filing my protest but not sure convincing 1 person to adjust vs 2 lemmings following a single leader makes a difference.