Auditor Wary Of Company Promising To Help Residents Lower Property Taxes

The Franklin County Auditor and professional property appraisers are concerned about Web-based companies that offer to help reduce homeowners’ property taxes without ever seeing homes, Consumer 10’s Kurt Ludlow reported.

John Peck, owner of Porter and Peck Appraisers, said that he has visited 60,000 properties during his 50-year career.

“An appraisal really takes quite a bit of time and quite a bit of analysis of the sales data, market data that is available to us,” Pecks aid.

Peck said that he was concerned when he learned that a company called ValueAppeal was mailing letters to homeowners saying that their homes were overvalued without ever having seen the homes.

“They’re holding out that this should be considered an estimate of value,” Peck said.

ValueAppeal is one of several companies that offer Web-based services that analyze property and property taxes.

“ValueAppeal helps homeowners prepare their property tax appeal quickly and easily, just like TurboTax helps consumers with their income taxes,” ValueAppeal Chief Executive Officer Charlie Walsh said.

For $99, the company produces a report listing comparable sales that homeowners can choose from and use in property tax appeals.

Franklin County Auditor Clarence Mingo said that he and his team have spent the past two years re-evaluating every property in the county in person.

He said he was wary of ValueAppeal because property owners could get everything they need for free at the Franklin County Auditor’s Web site.

“I don’t know if there’s anything illegal about what’s happening, but it puts customers in the position where they’re very vulnerable,” Mingo said. “In this instance, you have a company that knows very little about this market, doesn’t know the history, and they’re rendering an opinion without detailing how it is they arrived to that opinion about a market they know little about.”

Walsh said that his company had studied the Columbus market and developed a computer program that calculates which properties are the most likely to be overvalued. Walsh said that only those property owners receive letters from ValueAppeal.

“We do the hard work of researching and applying the local rules unique to Franklin County and Ohio, so the homeowner doesn’t have to,” Wash said.

Walsh said that homeowners filing property tax appeals on their own are successful about 40 percent of the time, and he said that his customers win their appeals about 80 percent of the time. If a homeowner is not successful, they provide a full refund, Ludlow reported.

Franklin County residents have until April 2 to file their property tax appraisal appeals with the Franklin County Board of Revision.

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