The Property Tax Appeal Hack Every California Homeowner Needs to Know

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• Why California homeowners may be paying too much in property taxes
• How Prop 13 and Prop 8 affect property tax assessments
• What makes a property assessment too high and when you can appeal
• Why Zillow estimates alone aren’t enough for a property tax appeal
• What comparable sales and evidence counties actually look for
• How the property tax appeal process works in California
• How Overassessed simplifies the research and filing process for homeowners
• Why reviewing your property assessment every year could save you thousands

In this episode with Fred Glick

Are you paying more in California property taxes than your home is actually worth?

In this episode, Fred Glick of Fred Glick and Stuart Altman, founder of Overassessed, break down how property tax assessments can become too high, when California homeowners may be able to appeal, and how the appeal process can be much easier to navigate than most people realize. From Prop 13 and Prop 8 to comparable sales, assessment evidence, and county appeals, this episode reveals how homeowners can challenge an overassessment and potentially save thousands on their California property taxes.

Save $20 on your property tax appeal with Overassessed. Get started here

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Fred Glick on LinkedIn
• Arrivva
• Arrivva Mortgage
• Stuart Altman on LinkedIn
• Overassessed.co
• Save $20 with Overassessed

Fred Glick (00:25)
Hi, everybody. I’m here with Stuart Altman and he has something very cool.

And something if you’re a homeowner in California may save you money because we all hate real estate taxes. when you buy a house, they basically take the new sale price, they multiply it by about 1.25%.

There’s some counties a little different, and then you’re kind of stuck with that, and they can keep.

raising your taxes and adding on that. And eventually five, seven, ten years down the road, you have this assessment and maybe it’s a little too high. Well Stuart’s got an idea for that. So Stuart, take it away.

Stuart Altman (01:04)
Yeah, thanks for the intro, Fred.

yeah, I’m I’m excited to talk about Overassessed, which is is what we launched earlier this year

and it basically helps homeowners appeal their assessment. you know, I like I think you know, we’ll probably get into these details, but you know, if other folks are like me, they may have no idea about how any of this works. And what originally took me down this rabbit hole led to just feeling like

There are all of these things available to homeowners to take advantage of, but if you don’t know how to navigate that system, you’re probably missing out on it.

And so in this case, it was being over-assessed on my own home, paying more than what I thought the actual market value was. And then as a result of actually appealing it and going through that process, saving a few thousand dollars, which is huge for you know, I’ve got two little two little ones running around the house and and every dollar helps.

Fred Glick (02:00)
for sure.

that could cost you plenty. What what do they say? It takes like a million dollars to raise a kid these days. It’s probably more by now.

Stuart Altman (02:08)
Yeah,

factor in inflation, it’s probably a little bit higher nowadays.

Fred Glick (02:12)
Crazy. So talk to me about what the municipality is and who are they and how does some of these work and maybe give me a couple of the example of where you bought and what you had to go through.

Stuart Altman (02:27)
Totally. Yeah. So I I think probably the best place to start is with kind of what took me down this path. And in and I’m sure a lot of homeowners see these mailers. You get in the mail, there’s a letter from a property tax specialist and they say, Hey, we think that your property

may be overassessed and you know, if you have us appeal your assessment, you don’t have to pay us anything. But if we’re successful, we’ll take thirty-five percent of whatever you save. And that, you know, if you’re not gonna do anything is great.

‘Cause you have no risk of downside, only upside potentially. And, you know, at the end of the day they do the work for you. I had a bit of time on my hands, so kind of looked into what is the actual process that’s involved here. and there’s two sort of laws at the highest level in California that that sort of were really educational for me. One is Prop thirteen, which is a a prop that was passed in the late seventies, but basically,

Is a cap on how much your property value can be raised, your assessment can be raised year over year. And this is why if you move into a new neighborhood, you’ve got a neighbor who maybe has lived there for 30 years, they may pay a couple thousand dollars on their property tax, and you may be paying $10,000. And what accounts for that difference is when they had purchased their home, their assessed value became their purchase price.

And then Prop 13 caps how much the county assessor can raise that assessed value each year by up to 2%. So in many cases, each county generally tends to raise up to that 2% maximum, but that 2% compounds. So, you know, if you buy it 50,000 and then it increases by 2%, the next year your your assessment’s gonna be 51,000, and then the next 2% on top of that, so on and so forth.

So there’s some control there for people who buy into a market to not potentially be down the line and be in a position where their assessment just has outgrown their capability to pay for it, which is, you know, great if you buy into a market and owning a home is an investment. There’s an analog though to prop thirteen, which is the other law that I I learned about. And prop eight basically helps you navigate a downturn in the market. So if you’re in my position where I purchased in

2024, I moved into a home in Oakland and we bought at a hot time in the market locally, and market conditions really do vary, really at a at a micro level. This was like a kind of a learning for me going through this process. But if you end up buying it when the market is high, the market kind of takes a downturn. And these things obviously shift over time, but

you can appeal your assessment through Prop 8 and say, hey, I think actually the market value of my home given this evidence is this. You’re telling me it’s this, but I’m I’m saying like this is what I think it actually is. They’ll review that and they’ll say, okay, like I agree with you or I disagree or whatever it is. But ultimately if you’re successful in appealing it, you know, you’ll you’ll stand to to save quite a bit of money. so that’s kind of what what took me down the path. and you know in in my particular

Case, you know, we appealed this year successfully, and our assessment reduced by more than $200,000, which ultimately amounts to you know, at the end of the day for us, it was close to $3,000 saved on our property tax bill for 2026, 2027 roll year. and then just kind of connecting back to that letter I had received, had I gone through one of these companies who had promised to do everything for me.

You know, I would have paid 35% of what I’d saved, close to $700, probably more than that, for a company to do this for me, which sure, for many people that may be the right choice. But when you actually start to go through what it takes to do this appeal process, you find out that it’s not that hard to navigate. And so I ended up building over assessed to sort of automate that whole process and just do it at a flat rate in many ways that’s kind of similar to the Arrivva model. So

Fred Glick (06:38)
Yeah, pretty much.

Flat fee. That’s that’s our thing.

So so what does it exactly do? It fills out the forms, it drives, it takes the information from public records, but where does it get the property value comps, I guess, is the description of it.

Stuart Altman (06:55)
Yeah, totally. so at the highest level,

what it does is it puts together all of the evidence that you need for an appeal. there’s a nuance that you should know, which is in California, every county that I’ve looked at, and I’m pretty sure this is consistent across California, there’s generally two processes.

There’s an informal process and there’s a formal process.

The informal process generally is so easy to go through. If you take Alameda County, for example, the hardest part is just figuring out what website to go to to go to and then filling out a form. So what we will do is we’ll put together your evidence package. We have gone through and mapped every single for the counties that we’ve fully supported and we continue to expand that, but we’ve gone through and mapped every field.

From your evidence package to the field forms that need to be filled out, often online, or sometimes will generate a PDF for you to just print and mail in and sign. and then and you’re off to the races. what we do in order to sort of power this whole model is we use real estate data that is public data that comes from the county offices, but we

Work with a data vendor who provides really high quality, sort of curated data for us. We will take the specific address of the property in question. And the first thing we’ll do on our website, you can go to the website today and do this, is you can run a free check. And what we’ll do in that free check is we’ll say, What’s your property address? You don’t need to sign up for anything. We’re not going to email you. You’re not going to be s signing away your personal data. It is literally a check that just tells you, here’s what your assessment is from the county, the most up-to-date county records.

Here’s the property details we have about you. And you can look at that and verify it and update it. You know, bed, bath, square footage, et cetera. and then here is sort of a pulse check on it through what’s referred to as an AVM, a automated valuation model. And this AVM calculation is a model used by our vendor, but it’s similar to what you see on a on a Zillow or the Zestimit or whatever they call it, but the sort of automated, what is my home worth if you look it up on Zillow?

And we do that just to do a quick check of without doing a detailed analysis, without drilling into the specifics of your home, do we think there’s some money to be saved here? And we’ll say, hey, we think this is likely, or if we don’t think there’s a case, there we say, we don’t think this is likely. but if you want to move forward, you still can. And hey, if you’re unsuccessful in appealing, we’ll just give you your money back. so what we do is we’ll run that free check and then we’ll use the the property data that we have and we’ll take it through.

in AI analysis through an AI model that we’ve tuned specifically to run assessor grade analyses. So the same level of analysis you would have if an assessor was putting together a specific analysis for your property. It’s going to pull a bunch of comps and those comps are going to be adjusted to be an apples to apples comparison to your home. So if you have a if your home is 1400 square feet and one of the comps within a quarter mile is 1600 square feet.

That 1600 square foot home is gonna have some of the assessed value removed from it because it’s slightly larger than your home. And so to create an apple to apple comparison, that’s a micro example of some of the factors that everything plays a role here. The the time of the sale, how far away it is, bed, bath, square footage, et cetera, et cetera.

we will automate that, we’ll run the analysis, and then we’ll give that to you. And we will walk you through step by step. Here’s how you do the informal process, here’s how you do the formal process, and we’ll turn what probably if you were to do this on your own and in the folks who I’ve talked to who have done this on their own in the past, and my own experience, it’ll take a four to six hour research activity into a 10 to 15 minute automated filing process.

Fred Glick (10:47)
Okay, so let’s

just get into some of the weeds.

first of all, I want to just clarify with people the assessment is not the tax amount. So let’s the the assessment is a quote unquote value that a county would use, which really isn’t even the market value. So the these are like I know in Philadelphia they use thirty two percent of the market value is the assessed value, and then they go and they raise

That assessed percentage as opposed to raising the actual tax rate. So there’s ways that they can manipulate this. So I guess what your AI is doing is comparing assessments based on different properties. Well, you assess this property at X, and why did you make this Y? And that’s kind of how they look at it. They they base it on assessment. Am I correct with that? Or are they looking at going to Zillow and looking at actual market value?

Stuart Altman (11:46)
No, they are they’re certainly not doing that. And that’s also why I think folks who try to do this on their own

get hung up because they might go to a Zillow and poll what Zillow says and try to use that as evidence to say that they’re overassessed. And and the county certainly will not accept that. It’s just not, it’s not good evidence. So

so what they are doing is in in these sort of the whole process that they go through, there’s quite a bit of like public domain information around what

Qualifies as an actual comparable property, what do you need to look at? and and so as I was going through this process and sort of kind of learning about it, fundamentally what it boils down to is

on January 1st of every year, there’s a that date is referred to as the lean date for the year. And what that means is the county is saying.

As of January first, we believe the assessed value of your home is X. You have, depending on the county, a certain amount of time to appeal that, but what you pull in as evidence can only be homes within ninety days of that into the future that have sold within ninety days of that in the future. So basically through March thirty first, or potentially further back in the past, but you need to adjust for for sort of time differences. I’m just

Yeah, but at the end of the day, what the assessor’s doing is they want to see an apples to apples comparison between your home and other subject properties, other properties that are actually comparable. So if you’re going, you know, they will see right through a appeal where you’re saying, well, this home next door to mine, which has one less bathroom, two more bedrooms, and you know, is a thousand square foot smaller than mine, just sold for a million dollars. But I spent two million dollars on my home, well, they’re

gonna say, well, that’s not even a comparable property. So what we do is we translate that if it actually is a comparable property, we will translate that into an apples to apples comparison, doing all of these adjustments to say, here’s what the actual value of this home is relative to your own home, the subject property. Does that make sense?

Fred Glick (13:59)
Yeah, yeah, sure does.

let me ask you this coming into my head. Say you had a tenant in a property and they trashed it. And now, you know, you gotta replace stuff and it’s a mess. I mean, is it something you can appeal the taxes by taking pictures and saying, look how horrible my condition is compared to these houses? Is that something that works?

Stuart Altman (14:22)
That’s a good question. you know, off off the top of my head, I’m not sure, but it’s worth clarifying two things about this.

If you go through an informal process, it’s very likely that that that level of detail is not even something that’s going to come up. Because these informal processes often are single forms where you provide three comparable properties with, you know, the the home information about it. And then it goes to the assessor and then they they make a determination.

But if you go

Through a formal process, which goes instead of to the office of the assessor, it goes to the clerk of the board of the supervisors.

that is an opportunity for you to bring more evidence and talk through, and you actually have people who are engaging in conversation with you about it. The one thing I’ll say about your example though is that appeals oftentimes an appeal places the burden of proof on the person who’s making the appeal.

in your example, if you were leasing your own home, you had a tenant in there, and then you’re on you’re trying to appeal for a lower assessment, you have to kind of bring the preponderance of evidence together to say, like, no, this is why it is actually lower, the market value is lower than my current assessment. If you are the owner living in your single family residence, the burden of proof is actually on the assessor.

And it is the assessor’s responsibility to affirmatively prove through overwhelming evidence that their assessment is correct. And that PowerShift, I know it’s sort of a minor detail here, but it’s actually really powerful. And it’s actually why so many of these companies that promise to do it for you and sort of take a major chunk of what they’ll save you really are benefiting from these structures that have been put in place to enable owners living in their own homes to be able to drive their own appeal process.

So a slight nuance there just on like the tenant example versus if it’s your your owner occupied residence, but regardless, I think that really shows up in a in a formal process more than an informal process.

Fred Glick (16:28)
Gotcha. Do

they allow an outside arm’s length appraisal of the property? I mean, does that help?

Stuart Altman (16:39)
it can and I think it certainly can as part of a formal appeal process. if we’re talking about the informal appeal process, no, it’s probably not

gonna help.

Fred Glick (16:50)
Okay. Fabulous. And where is this available?

Stuart Altman (16:54)
It’s available throughout

California. So we have I I talked about earlier, we have gone through some counties and specifically mapped every step in their workflow so that we make it as easy as possible.

So we’ve done that in six counties:

Alameda County, San Diego, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Los Angeles County. and I may be missing one off the top of my head. But for any county outside of that, we still have

in offering for them, which is basically a a less expensive version of the product that generates the evidence package and it will just require somebody within their own county to do some Googling and say, like, you know, X County decline in value appeal and then go to the website and then plug in data from the evidence package.

Fred Glick (17:39)
Got it. Got it. Okay, cool. Again, the website is

Stuart Altman (17:43)
It’s overassessed.co dot co. Yeah.

Fred Glick (17:47)
Okay, don’t put that dot com in, but

Stuart Altman (17:49)
I know, I know.

Fred Glick (17:51)
silence

the I was with a company that had a dot co and it was just like the guy who owned the dot com wanted so much money for it. It was crazy, but

Stuart Altman (18:01)
Yeah, they go. Yeah.

Fred Glick (18:02)
yeah, no, this is fantastic. And I mean, especially if you think you overpaid. I mean, it’s not gonna work in Cupertino. So Yep. And it’s not gonna work in San Francisco now, kids. That game is over.

But you know, any anywhere else where the values of you know, or you bought too high and now they’re lower, go ahead and give it a shot. It can’t can’t really hurt.

So and what’s your cost to do it?

Stuart Altman (18:29)
Yeah,

we charge $45 for the full package, which is the county mapped one, or $35 just for the evidence package that doesn’t have the full mapping. but through some of our partnerships, you know, we have really steeply discounted that. So down to $25 or or $20. so so yeah, so it’s like it truly is a no-brainer. It costs you nowadays less than a cup of coffee, depending on where you’re buying coffee.

just to get this done. And and it just can save you so much money. And I and I think if you’re, you know, if you’ve gotten these things in the mail, you’ve heard about Ownwell or Owl U or some of these other ones, I’d really seriously consider taking a shot with Oversess before just giving away so much of your potential savings to another company. Because the way that these companies work too is once they got you, they’ll hold on to you and you’re automatically enrolled every single year. The reality is, is that’s

structurally designed too in the way that the law should be working for a homeowner. Because once you get a successful appeal through, the county will be going back to look at you next year and say, should they remain low or should they jump back up to their assessed value? Which by the way, your property, your property 13 base year value, that sort of one that keeps going up by 2%, that’s going to continue to go up by 2%, even in years where you have received a reduction. So as soon as that market recovers, it’s going to pop back up there. So it never hurts you.

beginning of the year, run a free check, see if you might be overassessed and then, you know, spend a few minutes to save yourself potentially a thousand dollars.

Fred Glick (20:02)
There you go. But people can go to the site now and kind of get an idea, right? You

Stuart Altman (20:06)
Totally. Yeah.

Fred Glick (20:07)
have to wait till January for sure.

Stuart Altman (20:09)
sorry for interrupting. The last thing I’ll say is there are filing deadlines right now. So most most counties, all counties either have September fifteenth or November thirtieth, depending on the county, as their deadline to to file your appeal for the twenty six, twenty seven role year. And then next year will be the next one. So

Fred Glick (20:28)
Gotcha. Gotcha.

Great stuff, Stuart. We really appreciate it. And everybody, if you can use it, please use it and tell your friends. Thanks again.

Stuart Altman (20:39)
Thanks so much, Fred.

Fred Glick (20:40)
All right. Take care.

Take care. Bye bye.