Anger, businesses help fuel property tax appeals

By Christopher Quinn

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Larry Singleton and Donna Broadus saw an upside of falling property values and built a business on it.

They help homeowners lower their taxes by appealing property tax bills, and business is booming.

"I was having a lot of my clients come to me and ask what to do," said Broadus, who is also a real estate agent.

When values drop, so should property taxes. To make sure that happens, owners can appeal the value a county assigns their property and try to get it lowered, but not everyone wants the hassle of researching values and dealing with government bureaucracies.

Singleton, a property appraiser and broker by trade and a former Cherokee County commissioner, knew the ropes, so the two friends started My Property Tax Appeal. They do the work. They go to the hearings. They charge $35 and take a one-time cut of 30 percent of whatever they save an owner.

Cal Rogers of Smyrna hired them after getting his Cobb County tax bill this year.

"Just after the housing bubble burst, they raised my taxes by several hundred dollars," he said. "I said, ‘That's not right.' "

Their appeal got his tax bill dropped from $2,977 to $2,494.

"So they saved me nearly 500 bucks," Rogers said.

Singleton and Broadus thought most of their business would come from Cherokee County, but they are working one end of metro Atlanta to the other. They've had about 500 clients.

Broadus said most clients have homes in the $250,000 to $500,000 range, and they have gotten values reduced by as much as $90,000. She estimated more than 80 percent of the clients have had their bills cut, saving hundreds of dollars up to $4,546.

Singleton said when the real estate market was booming, many were content to let their property tax bills ride. But when the market turned down, owners began thinking their tax bills were not reflecting the values of their homes.

Interest in appeals also was boosted by an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year of more than half a million tax and sales records. It showed thousands of metro Atlanta properties are overvalued for tax purposes.

"I think people are angry," Broadus said. "Now, there is an outcry."

It is showing up in the staggering increase in the number of appeals in metro Atlanta.

A first step in an appeal is filing a county property tax return, which is a declaration of what an owner thinks his property is worth.

In Fulton County, owners filed 1,920 property tax returns in 2008. This year, that zoomed to 15,273 returns. Gwinnett County had 2,200 returns in 2008; this year, it had 31,983.

Cobb County owners filed 900 returns three years ago and 12,901 this year. Clayton County had 3,775 returns in 2007 and 10,268 this year. DeKalb County's numbers were unavailable.

An anomaly is Cherokee, which had 3,070 returns in 2007. That dropped to 2,763 this year.

Steve Swindell, Cherokee' s deputy chief appraiser, said he believes they dropped because Cherokee was the only county in metro Atlanta that appraised each property and notified every owner yearly. All counties must do that now, thanks to state legislation passed this year.

"We’ve lowered values three years in a row, the last two rather substantially," Swindell said. "I think the folks of the county are getting the idea that we’re doing what we can to reflect the current market."

Singleton and Broadus are not the only ones to recognize the opportunity.

Steve Pruitt, Gwinnett County's chief appraiser, estimated the number of agents representing owners has tripled this year.

Broadus said business will probably taper off in a few years.

"But you will always see a need for it, because you are always going to have some houses that are overpriced," she said.