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Tax Assessment Appeals

If your county's assessed value is higher than your property is worth, you are paying tax on money you do not have. An appraisal is the evidence that changes it.

How the Florida process works

Every August your county property appraiser sends a TRIM notice — Notice of Proposed Property Taxes — showing the assessed and market values used for the coming year. That notice starts the clock.

The first step is usually informal: call the property appraiser's office and ask them to review the assessment. Many disagreements resolve there, at no cost, particularly where the county's record for your property is simply wrong about square footage, bedroom count, or a feature you do not have.

If that fails, you petition the county's Value Adjustment Board. The petition deadline is statutory and short — it falls in September, keyed to the TRIM notice mailing date printed on your own notice. Check the date on your notice and confirm it with your county's VAB office; do not rely on a date you read on a website, including this one. Miss it and you wait a year.

What actually wins

Not that your taxes went up. Not that your neighbour pays less. The question is whether the county's market value for your property, as of 1 January, exceeds what the property was actually worth on that date.

That makes it a retrospective assignment with a fixed effective date, and it makes the comparable evidence the whole argument. Where owners succeed it is usually because a specific, documentable condition problem — deferred maintenance, an unpermitted or defective addition, functional obsolescence, an adverse location factor — is not reflected in a mass-appraisal model that never inspected the property.

Florida's Save Our Homes cap complicates the arithmetic: on a long-held homestead the assessed value can sit well below market value, in which case an appeal may achieve nothing even if the market value is overstated. We will tell you if that is your situation before you engage us.

Our experience

Appraising South Florida since 1992, 34,000+ appraisals in Palm Beach, Martin, St. Lucie and Broward counties. Residential only.

How the assignment runs

First, the arithmetic check that costs you nothing: if Save Our Homes has your assessed value far below market, a successful market-value appeal changes no dollars, and we tell you before any engagement. If an appeal has teeth, we appraise to 1 January, document the specific conditions the county's model missed — with photographs, dated — and deliver a report shaped for a VAB magistrate: short path to the point, evidence attached, method shown.

What the county's number actually is

Mass appraisal values your property with a statistical model that never entered it. It works tolerably at the median and fails at the edges — the house with the failed addition, the deferred roof, the busy-road frontage the model prices like the quiet street behind it. Your petition succeeds by proving your property sits at an edge. Informal review first, always: many counties correct plain record errors — wrong square footage, phantom bathrooms — with a phone call, no petition required.

Call 561-853-2129 or use the contact form.

Questions we hear about this work

What evidence wins a VAB petition?

Documentation that the county's 1 January market value exceeds reality for your specific property: an appraisal to that date, plus proof of condition problems a mass-appraisal model cannot see.

When is the deadline to appeal?

September, keyed to the TRIM notice mailing date printed on your own notice. Confirm the date with your county's VAB — do not rely on any website, including this one.

Is a tax appeal appraisal different from a normal one?

Same discipline, fixed effective date of 1 January, built to be read by a special magistrate. Save Our Homes math determines whether winning would even lower your bill — we check that first.

Can you handle the appeal itself?

We provide the valuation evidence. The petition and any hearing advocacy are yours or your representative's; we can testify to the appraisal where needed.