August 03 2012
ValueAppeal™ PRO helps real estate agents grow their business and retain existing clients with value-added services that ensure their clients are not overpaying property taxes. The ValueAppeal™ PRO solution enables agents to achieve these goals in several ways – by providing lead lists, by encouraging customer loyalty with an additional complimentary service, or by generating revenue (some agents choose to charge for the service). Let's look into this interesting product more closely.
Assessors use mass appraisal algorithms to determine a property assessment based on other homes in the area. According to ValueAppeal™, this is an imperfect process because assessors look at homes by the thousands instead of by each individual property – leaving 25% of homes overassessed. It's that 25% of homes that are overassessed and could use some help with an appeal that real estate agents can target with ValueAppeal™.
The ValueAppeal™ PRO system provides an estimate for whether or not property taxes for a specific address are too high, and by how much, based on eligible comparable home sales. According to the company, they have about an 80% success rate in lowering an assessment compared to the 40% of homeowners that do it themselves.
ValueAppeal™ PRO was built specifically for professionals seeking to assist homeowners in lowering property taxes. The PRO platform provides special tools to real estate professionals, including the ability to analyze a property, determine if it is overassessed or not, create an appeal report, and manage the appeal process. From RE Technology's demo, it appears that ValueAppeal™ PRO does this quickly and easily, and presents the information very professionally.
So, let's dive into what we saw during that demo. First things first: to find out if a property is overassessed, simply enter the address.
For each property, you'll receive a detailed analysis.
Note that, in addition to the current county or jurisdiction's assessment, the analysis includes a target assessment and the client's potential savings if the assessment is lowered.
If you'd like to create a report for this client, you can do it in about five minutes by selecting the comparable sales and completing a brief and optional questionnaire about the property. The process of selecting comparables and the analysis is dynamic and you can change them based on proximity, sale price, characteristics and square footage to reach a target assessment and savings. You can then generate the report.
Each completed report has three key components:
It's up to the agent to have the homeowner sign the required form and send the completed form to the appropriate jurisdiction as identified on the instructions. ValueAppeal™ PRO helps manage the appeals process with built-in workflow and tools such as Tasks and Notes.
Those are the basic functions that most users will become familiar with. Now let's look at a few of the things we liked best about this platform.