Today I’m going down to the Harris county tax assessors office to contend they have valued my house to highly for tax purposes. It will be interesting to see how it goes. You are suppose gather evidence why your appraisal is wrong. Then first you present it to an assessor in a one on one thing. If you still don’t feel satisfied you go before a three person board and make your case. There are two ways to contest, first you can say it isn’t equal or you can say it isn’t market value. I’ve kind of done both.

I’ve looked up the appraisals of everyone on my street, figured the average per square foot value and used that to calculate my value which is $33,000 less based on square footage and lost size. Found out in the process I’ve got the largest house on the street and the smallest lot.

Secondly I took the three comparison houses they used and figured their average price per square footage. That lowered us almost $22,000. Don’t know where they got their value. They give you a break down, but they have lots of added costs that don’t seem to correspond to anything.

Lastly I figured the price per square foot for the last 10 houses sold in our neighborhood, and used it to calculate our cost. Again down $10,000.

Too top off all of this we had an air condition company come out and give us a estimate to make our AC actually cool our house. $10,000. And we have the siding on our house deteriorating, which we photographed, but didn’t have time to get an estimate.

Wish me luck