ValueAppeal Web Based Assessment Appeals - Great Idea, But Does It Work?

 
The other day I received a very interesting piece of mail about a new service called ValueAppeal which has piqued my interest. The idea is a third party company that collates all the public sales and assessment data for an area and tries to find homes that are being overassessed, and hence pay too much on property tax. The assessment number they gave for our own home seemed a bit low, but I had always wondered why our assessment kept going up even when home prices were supposed to be going down. I went to their website to see how many of the homes on our street were flagged as being overassessed and I put in 14 of the homes. It decided that 8 of the 14 were overassessed and 6 were not. In their literature they say they only target 20 to 25% of properties, but on our street it looks like more than 50%. There is a large variety of home sizes on our street, however, with a lot of older, custom homes that have been modified over the years so no two are alike and some are much larger than others. We live in one of the smaller, least expensive homes on the street and they seem to be ones more often that are flagged as being "unfairly assessed".


Since they have a money guarantee that if you are not reassessed lower they will refund your $99 fee, I may try them out to see what happens. Has anyone else in the St. Louis County (Missouri) area tried them out yet? We have until July 9, 2012 to appeal our latest assessment! I had first thought I would try to submit my own appeal using the St. Louis County web site (you can do it for free), but after more than an hour scouring the Internet on a Saturday morning, I am thinking ValueAppeal can probably do a better job! I bet the county assessors everywhere hate it when ValueAppeal blanket mails an area. I can see a lot of people skipping the offer though, and not trying it, but I am willing to give it a shot.