What "Uniform and Equal" Means — and Why It Wins Protests
Most homeowners argue market value and lose. The stronger argument is that your neighbors with the same house are assessed for less — and Texas law says that alone is grounds for a reduction.
Texas gives a property owner two independent grounds to protest an appraisal. The first, market value, is the one everybody reaches for: the district says the house is worth $612,400, the owner believes it is worth less, and the argument becomes a debate about what a buyer would pay. Districts are good at that debate. They do it several hundred times a season.
The second ground is unequal appraisal, and it is the one that wins. Section 41.43(b)(3) of the Tax Code says a protest must be granted if the appraised value exceeds the median appraised value of a reasonable number of comparable properties, appropriately adjusted. Note what is absent from that sentence: any question of what the house is actually worth.
Why the equity argument is harder to refute
A market-value argument asks the panel to prefer your opinion of value to the district's. An equity argument asks them to compare the district's own numbers against each other. If six houses on the same street, of the same age, size and construction class, are on the roll at $171 a square foot and yours is at $192, the district has to explain the difference using its own data.
You are not arguing that the district is wrong about your house. You are arguing that it is inconsistent with itself.
What "appropriately adjusted" is doing in that sentence
It is doing most of the work. A raw price-per-square-foot table is not evidence — a comp with a pool, a larger lot, or a later build year is not comparable until those differences are priced and removed. That is why every comp in one of our packets carries six explicit adjustment lines: size, age, lot, pool, garage, and construction quality, each with the arithmetic attached.
A comp adjusted by more than 25% of its own assessed value is not a comp. We drop those and say so in the packet, because a set you cannot defend the boundaries of is one the district will pick apart.
The median, not the mean
The statute says median, and the statute is right. One unusual comp under a mean moves the answer by thousands of dollars, and it is the first thing an appraiser will point at. A median survives an outlier and survives cross-examination.
See what your county has you down for
One address, no account, no card. We check the comps and the homestead cap and tell you whether a protest would move your bill at all.
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