They just never, ever actually visit a property, when it’s time to appraise it for the next year, and they never, ever look at building permits to find houses that are undergoing work and obviously likely increasing in value. When you buy or sell a property they send a form letter, asking you to let them know what it sold for, but as far as I can tell they never actually use the data, as I’ve sent a few back when selling properties and they still haven’t updated the appraised value.

All of which is obviously a good thing for me, but kind of odd, based on your comment and what I’ve heard from other people. Seems like they’d be highly motivated to find some reason to jack up taxes even more, instead of just using a formula year after year that assumes a ~3% increase in value.

3-5 years before taxes change? Down here, they smell the sawdust and over-inflate the price before the next tax cycle. Which means you have to file a protest. Which also means you have to drive to downtown Houston and sit outside some random door for 2 seperate days waiting until they call your number because they can’t or won’t be any more efficient. Which follows that over-inflated tax values tend to get stuck and stay that way.

We’ve looked at a house recently listed for 99K that’s HCAD value is 201K. I have to wonder if that extra $300 or so might be the reason the family lost the home to foreclosure. We’d have to figure in that protest plus probably at least one year of those astronomical taxes.