Current mood:	aggravated
Entry tags:	austin life, house holding

Tax Protesting - 1st Round
Because I'd protested my taxes before, I knew to come to the Travis County Tax Assessor's office ready. It's a stuffy, crowded space and they make you wait even when you have a scheduled pre-hearing. So, a light, summery dress, sandals and a book. Sure enough, there were about 30 people crammed in a hallway and my hearing was 45 min late.

The young man was nice who reviewed my case. When I explained I lived, not just on the edge, but at the corner/tip of a nice neighborhood with a fast drop-off in quality of homes behind and to the right of me, he allowed me to choose the streets for comparables. So that was easy to choose.

But then I noticed: all the sales he was showing me were from 2008. June, July, August. The most recent was Sep 2 2008. Maybe someone else wouldn't have noticed that, but the real estate market really started taking a dive in the fall. The prices now reflect the implosion finally getting to Austin.

So I asked for 2009 numbers. And he got a kind of odd look and said there weren't any. As in, no sales in my neighborhood in the past 8 months?? A day later and I now suspect that Travis CAD was chosing not to put the recent figures into their system on purpose, so they could argue the higher numbers.

I can't go for that. I'm doing the formal hearing next week. In the meantime, I've got to get a real estate agent to give me comparables from my neighborhood from the MLS database. The pre-hearing officer did offer to relook at my case if I emailed him something, but right now he only offered 3% less. As in, with Zillow showing N. Austin trended down by 16% in the past year, the tax appraisers will "only" raise my value by a positive 13%.