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Eric:
My name is Eric and I am a homeowner. We live in a house that we built three years ago and we’ve used a Home Tax Shield for both our primary residence and for a rental property that we own and operate.
Interviewer:
Tell us a little bit about this house that you built.
Eric:
We moved to Texas and within the last five years and always had the dream of building my own house. Growing up around my dad, who’d built his own houses, it was something that I wanted to do and I’m in a creative field and had aspirations of wanting to do some component of the designing. We hired an architect and built the kind of home that we had dreamed of and imagined it was a super fun process. It was fun to put our fingerprints all over the place, everything from choosing the land to designing my home office for my business that I own and just accommodating things and creating spaces for our family and where we wanted to how we wanted to live and kind of the the new place that we were living.
Interviewer:
Where is the home that you have built?
Eric:
Our home is built in Fair Oaks Ranch, Texas, which is just north of San Antonio near Burnie.
Interviewer:
How did you feel when you first got your annual property value assessment from the County?
Eric:
The first time I received a property tax bill, I was pretty shocked by just the amount of tax and just without being fully aware of kind of the differences in state taxes. And so I was like, this is a big bill. So I’m going to do whatever it is within my power to, to address it, protest it, and kind of learn those things along the way.
Interviewer:
What was your first step when you decided to protest your tax bill?
Eric:
I was kind of at a loss of what to do. I asked friends who had lived here all their lives. How do you protest your property taxes? People who were builders, people who I thought would have the answers, and most of them never protested themselves. So, I just kind of jumped into a research role and figuring out how to do it. Then I just kind of flew by the seat of my pants, trying to justify a case for a lower bill. In some cases, there are hard costs that were easy to justify because it was a new build or cost of land. I had some success early on just protesting on the value of the land. And then when, once our house was built, dealing with that whole protest process became pretty cumbersome and consuming.
Interviewer:
How were you feeling throughout this whole process?
Eric:
I was totally unsure what was involved. It was intimidating. You try to make a case and I’m just kind of pulling together numbers and doing research. I’m unsure if the information that I had was going to be useful or valuable. And then on top of that our protests happened to occur in person. So there was a date set and it felt a little bit intimidating to try to justify the value of our home or say that we feel like it’s less because we want to pay less property tax. After a couple of years, I got kind of comfortable with that process, and then I had a conversation with an expert from Home Tax Shield. I asked many questions like, what is the appraisal district really looking for? What do the appraisal people care about? Can a private homeowner actually do a good job at it compared to a professional? I got some great answers from Home Tax Shield and gave them a shot and it was just it was a really smooth and easy process to go through.
Interviewer:
Tell me a little bit about that when you first heard of Home Tax Shield and realized this might be the service that lifts this burden off of you.
Eric:
When I first heard about Home Tax Shield I was hopeful but cautiously optimistic, unsure about what the process would be like and wondering if they could do if they could protest my property tax in a way that would be effective, or if it was kind of a big operation that wouldn’t give real specific attention to the homeowner. As a homeowner protester, you have really no idea what you’re doing. You’re kind of doing the best that you can and not knowing if the agreed-upon value left money on the table with them. How much lower would they have gone? And so there’s just so many unknowns. Partnering with Home Tax Shield and a team of experts just gave me so much confidence and peace of mind that someone who knows what they’re doing is caring for my property, with the information that I have, or the improvements that we’ve had.
At the end of the day, just peace of mind is what I value most about Home Tax Shield. It’s like our money management to know that we have someone who’s looking over our investments and our, our wellbeing just gives me peace of mind that I can focus on the things that are important to me whether it be my family, my wife, my business, and just kind of living life without worrying about those things that I’m pretty ill-equipped to handle.
Interviewer:
How much money did a Home Tax Shield end up saving you?
Eric:
2020 was the first year that we used Home Tax Shield and they saved us $500 off of our property tax.
Interviewer:
What was the process of working with Home Tax Shield, like for you? Like what, how much work did you have to do with Home Tax Shield versus all the work you’d been doing on your own?
Eric:
The process of working with Home Tax Shield was really honestly shockingly easy. I own a graphic design studio and we designed websites for people. So we’re always considering what the user experience is like. And I went in kind of just, just guessing what that might be like and expecting it to be kind of clunky. And honestly, it was so easy to sign up, so quick and data-driven, I was surprised that they could reference my properties immediately. It was really seamless and easy. It was so easy. I was just waiting for there to be more complications. At a certain point, there was an email that came asking if we had any support information to provide, and being a DIY protester, of course, I had probably too many and maybe useless things for them, but I sent it all. And then our protest went on without kind of behind the scenes. I was able to just keep doing what I needed to do, and when the decision had been made, we were notified and our, our, our property value, our appraisal value was, was reduced significantly by Home Tax Shield in 2020.
Interviewer:
Did you feel like Home Tax Shield really kept you in the loop throughout the whole process?
Eric:
I absolutely felt like a Home Tax Shield kept me in the loop. There was regular and frequent communication. When I had questions I would send them in and there was prompt response. So I felt very well taken care of.
Interviewer:
Tell me did you have to do an in-person meeting once you started working with Home Tax Shield,
Eric:
You never have to appear in person for a hearing for Home Tax Shield, because there’s professionals handling that for you. It was nice to offload that burden to somebody else. And honestly, it came about because the year previous I had scheduled my property tax protest hearing while on travel out of state in a different time zone, and due to calendar malfunction, I ended up driving to my appointment two hours late and missing it. And so all of the work that I had done just to prepare for that hearing was lost in the process of trying to reschedule was just so cumbersome that I just kind of gave up and I was looking for something easier. And lo and behold that year some friends had referred me to Home Tax Shield and it couldn’t have been better timing for me to kind of throw my hands up and say, I need to stop wasting my time, filing my own property tax protests, and let someone who knows what they’re doing handle it.
Interviewer:
So how long did the whole process take for you?
Eric:
The time savings were significant. The process was super easy and as I’ve said before, the website was the signup process. The communication was all very clean and streamlined. I’ve actually referred the website experience to other people and clients just because of how nice it was, even if they’re out of state and not even qualifying for Texas property tax protests. I’ve also referred Home Tax Shield to other real estate agents and neighbors being a do-it-yourself, or you learn enough about the process that you can speak slightly intelligently about it. But now just for my time and money, I’m like, I just want to, I just want to send it to Home Tax Shield and forget about it for the rest of my life, knowing that someone else will be doing it.
Interviewer:
Did you feel like the Home Tax Shield pricing was fair?
Eric:
I absolutely felt like the Home Tax Shield pricing was fair. The percentage that’s shared between Home Tax Shield and, and me, the homeowner was totally fair and reasonable. I just believe that over the long haul, the steady watching and protesting of my property tax protests by a professional is going to be something that’s going to yield benefits over any kind of time that I put in or attempts that I make.
Interviewer:
Do you have any plans for the money that you saved in 2020?
Eric:
I don’t have any specific plans, but I’m always doing whatever I can to lower my monthly mortgage payment and we fold our property taxes into our mortgage payment. So if that can stay checked and stay low, then it’s just kind of a monthly benefit that we realized by paying a little bit less for our mortgage and property tax.
Interviewer:
How happy are you with your decision to use Home Tax Shield?
Eric:
I’ve been thrilled with the service Home Tax Shield provides. And I think at the end of the day, it just gives me peace of mind that my property is being looked after by somebody who knows what they’re doing.
Interviewer:
Would you recommend Home Tax Shield to a friend?
Eric:
I would absolutely recommend Home Tax Shield to a friend after learning about how few people protest their property taxes. I’m kind of an advocate for property protesting so I tell people all the time. I’m just shocked that they don’t protest their property taxes and it is this easy thing that you can now just unload it onto somebody and they’re professionals. They do this for a living and I just ask why wouldn’t you do it?
Interviewer:
Is there anything else that you would want to say about the Home Tax Shield experience?
Eric:
Yes. We use Home Tax Shield for our personal property and for a rental house that we have and have had great results on both properties. The value of protesting property taxes on a rental property are just as important as your primary home. It’s always great to make sure that those property taxes are as low as possible to make that that rental as profitable as possible.
Interviewer:
Tell me about how important it was for you to get to that fair tax value of your property.
Eric:
Having a fair tax value seems critical in just owning a home. And when you dig into the numbers and look at what neighboring properties are paying for their fair tax value. There’s such a wide that it’s a little bit disconcerting. We built a home recently, so our home is newer and that fair tax value was relatively high compared to comparable square footage or amount of land. It doesn’t always feel equitable or right when our fair tax value was much higher than neighboring properties. It’s been great to have someone in my corner that will handle that and do that for me going forward.
Interviewer:
What is your kind of theory the wild fluctuation in property taxes?
Eric:
My theory on the fair tax value fluctuation amongst properties is that people who are diligent in protesting their property taxes will keep them checked and at reasonable and the lowest possible or fair tax value rates. My hypothesis is that people who leave their property values unchecked or don’t protest are going to always receive the counties maximum inflation for their property value, which sounds nice in a selling market, but, for the sake of property taxes, homeowners always want to have their property taxes as, as low as possible and thus their appraisal values as low as possible. You see wild variances in comparable properties because some people pay attention to protesting their property taxes and others do not know that it is an option or it’s available and every year they just take the appraisal increase that the County hands out to them.
The more you dig into the appraisal district and kind of the public database, you can see all of those variances. When I was protesting as a do-it-yourself, or I was looking at what my neighbors were paying and, and surprised by how, how vastly different they were. And I just assumed that if someone had a really high appraisal value for a comparable property, they must not have been too concerned about their taxes going up, or they just didn’t even know that that was really an option. The more I’ve kind of had conversations with folks, I’ve learned that they don’t really know what’s possible in property tax protesting. When I spoke with an expert at Home Tax Shield, I learned a lot more about that process just to kind of confirm some of my suspicions and my hunches about the property tax protest process but also learned a lot about how professionals handle it how I don’t have the time or bandwidth to do that every year and go sort through those databases and try to establish what is a reasonable fair market value for my home.
It’s so nice to unburden myself from that chore each year and leave it into the hands of Home Tax Shield.