Property tax consultants keep 40% to 50% of the win. Ownwell keeps 25%.

ISSUE 11 · 8 MIN

Ownwell reads a county's appraisal roll, finds the homes assessed above their neighbors, files the protest, and argues it, for 25% to 35% of whatever the county gives back, which its own figures put at $774 a year for the average winning customer. Colton Pace's company reports processing more than 1 million appeals and saving $400 million. The terrain was open because the consultants who did this job by hand kept 40% to 50% of the win, and 74% of homeowners never asked anyone to do it.

Every spring, counties around the United States mail a notice that says what it thinks your house is worth, and the fall tax bill is that number times the local rate. The number comes from a mass appraisal model run over hundreds of thousands of parcels, so it is wrong in both directions, and in Texas you have until May 15, or 30 days after the notice arrives, to say so. The job used to belong to a homeowner with a free afternoon or to a consultant who charged a share of the result.

Ownwell does the job as software. You type an address, and it pulls the assessment and the sales of comparable homes, decides whether an appeal is worth filing, and if it is, files and argues it in your name and bills a share of the first year's savings only when the county lowers the number. The pricing page uses 25% as its worked example, and the FAQ says the fee runs 25% to 35% depending on the state, with no minimum and nothing owed if the appeal fails. The homepage puts the success rate at 88% and the average annual savings for customers who win at $774, and in February 2026 the company raised $50 million, $30 million of it equity and $20 million debt, to take the service national.

State and local governments collected $797 billion of property tax in 2024, and the number the rate is applied to comes from a county assessor's model that is regressive. Christopher Berry's study of Chicago sales from 2007 to 2016 found that homes which sold for $100,000 were assessed on average at $151,585, while homes which sold for $1,000,000 were assessed at $647,030, and across his data the assessed share of price falls by about 34% each time the sale price doubles.

Property tax consultants fix this for a fee, and they price it the way a contingency lawyer does. O'Connor & Associates takes half of the first year's savings and reports $213 million saved for clients in 2025. Five Stone Tax Advisers takes 40%. Texas Protax takes 40% with a $50 minimum per parcel, billed at year-end. The volume is large: Harris County alone received 528,170 protests in 2023, and the Cook County Board of Review took 273,907 appeals for tax year 2024, a record.

The toll existed because the work was a phone job with a deadline and a license. Texas Tax Code 41.44 closes the protest window on May 15 or 30 days after the notice, whichever is later. The evidence lives in county databases built for assessors rather than owners, and anyone paid to represent an owner in Texas must hold a property tax consultant registration under Occupations Code 1152.151. Those factors kept the job with licensed firms, while 74% of homeowners in Ownwell's national survey said they had never appealed and 57% did not know they had the right.

What changed is that county data is now open (Cook County publishes its parcel sales, its appeal decisions, and the code for its valuation model), so the comparable-sales analysis is a query and the filing costs almost nothing. The incumbents' most recent move was a lawsuit rather than a price cut: Texas Tax Protest, a Dallas consultancy, sued Ownwell in federal court over its advertising, and a judge kept the advertising claims alive, as the Dallas Morning News reported on September 10, 2025. The price advantage is the gap between a 25% share of $774 in savings and the 40% to 50% the consultants still charge, and, below both, a flat $49.

A mention here is listed, never sold.

LISTED · CONTINGENCY APPEAL AGENT

Founded and run by Colton Pace, with Joseph Noor as CTO. Type an address, and Ownwell decides whether the assessment is high against comparable homes, files the appeal, and charges 25% to 35% of the first year's savings (25% in its own worked example), nothing if it loses. Its homepage reports an 88% success rate, $774 average annual savings for winners, a 4.7 rating across 3,000+ Google reviews, and $400 million saved since 2020; the February 2026 funding release adds more than 1 million appeals processed, 200,000 properties appealed in Texas in 2024, and $74 million raised in total.

Reach them · ownwell.com · @OwnwellOfficial

LISTED · FLAT FEE APPEAL KIT

Travis Bunn, with 15 years in real estate after a quantitative trading career, built AppealDesk in Nashville to sell the same evidence for a one-time $49, so homeowners keep 100% of the savings. The about page says it covers 50 states and 3,100+ counties; the homepage reports $2.75 million and more in assessment reductions for customers over the last 90 days and publishes county results: 98.68% in Hays County, Texas, 89.2% in Harris County, 62% in Cook County, and about 60% nationally. It is the buyer-side answer to the contingency model, because the price does not rise with the win.

Reach them · appealdesk.com · Travis Bunn

Take one Texas homeowner whose protest wins and whose bill drops by Ownwell's average, $774. Ownwell's take rate, the share of the money moving through a service that the service keeps, is 25% in its worked example, so it invoices $193.50 and the homeowner keeps $580.50; at 35%, the top of its range, the invoice is $270.90. O'Connor's version, using the $764 example on its own page, is an invoice of $382 and a homeowner who keeps $382. AppealDesk's version is $49, whatever happens, which is 6.3% of the average win.

Now price in the failures. Ownwell reports an 88% success rate, so of 100 homeowners who sign up, 88 produce an invoice, and 12 produce none, and revenue per sign-up is $170.28 rather than $193.50. Cost to serve, what it costs to deliver the service to one customer, is where the agent wins, and we must assume it because no builder publishes it: assume $20 per appeal in data pulls, model runs, and filing when the county settles at the informal stage, and $150 when a registered person must sit through an appraisal review board hearing. On those assumptions, each sign-up leaves $150.28 after direct costs if every case settles early and $20.28 if every case goes to a hearing, which is why the business depends on the share of appeals the county concedes early, and why a firm that sends a licensed person to every hearing cannot price below 40%.

The number the CFO watches next is days sales outstanding, the average number of days between doing the work and receiving the cash. The protest is filed by May 15, the hearing comes in summer, the reduction is final in the fall, and Texas Protax says it bills at year-end, so the builder pays for months of work before a dollar arrives, and a debt line like the $20 million in Ownwell's round is the usual way to pay for that wait. For the build to make money at scale, the county has to keep conceding most appeals without a hearing, the customer has to come back next spring without a new acquisition cost, since the fee is only on the first year's savings, and the fee has to survive a competitor selling the same evidence for $49.

The narrowest wedge is one county with open data and a short calendar. Cook County publishes parcel sales, appeal decisions, and the assessor's own valuation model. Pull every residential parcel, score each home against the assessed value per square foot of its nearest comparable sales, and write only to the owners whose assessment is above the comparables by a margin the county usually concedes. Charge the AppealDesk price, a flat $49 for the packet and the pre-filled appeal, or the Ownwell price, a share of savings, only if you can wait until year-end to be paid. The rail is a card charge at checkout for the flat fee, or an invoice after the county's final notice for the share. The one integration that matters is the county's online appeal form, because a packet the owner must retype never gets filed. In Texas, filing for pay requires the consultant registration, so either sell the packet to the owner, who files it, or register. The first customer to call owns an older house on a street where three neighbors sold cheap last year, and gets the notice in April.

RECON · TWO TERRAINS WHERE THE TOLL STILL STANDS

We found two jobs where an incumbent still collects and no builder is standing yet this week, with the sources attached. Five neighboring jobs already have someone on them, so they are not here: Zollback on customs duty drawback, V7 on lease expense audits, JustClaims on homeowners insurance claims, Claimy on unmatched music royalties, and cancelmypmi.ai on mortgage insurance.

RECON · UNCLAIMED PROPERTY

The signal: New York's comptroller reports $501,227,478 returned to owners so far in 2026 and over $2 million a day, and the state administrators' association says about 1 in 7 people has property waiting. Who collects: finder firms that write to owners for a share, capped by statute at 10% of the value recovered plus attorney's fees in Texas and at 10% in California, where the agreement counts only if signed after the state has paid. The states cannot chase every owner; they publish a database and wait. The build: an agent that matches a person's past names and addresses against every state database, gathers the identity proof, and files. Price: a flat $25 per successful claim, our suggestion. First customer: an estate attorney closing probate files.

RECON · SALES TAX REFUNDS

The signal: Texas gives a business four years from the due date to claim a refund of tax paid in error, then keeps it; Basis raised $100 million on February 24, 2026 for accounting agents, none of them a refund specialist. Who collects: reverse audit firms, which bill a portion of the refund on contingency and publish no percentage, and law firms, which Sales Tax Helper says charge $10,000 to $25,000 and more per engagement. Neither touches a small business, because reviewing four years of invoices by hand costs more than the refund. The build: an agent that reads the payables ledger, flags exempt purchases charged tax, and files the refund forms. Price: 15% of recovered tax, our suggestion. First customer: a manufacturer with four years of ledger exports.

mattjonesorg/cook-county-tax-appeal-comps. A Python script that takes a Cook County parcel number, pulls the home's record and comparable sales live from the assessor's map layer and the county's open data, ranks the comparables by strength of evidence, computes a suggested market value, and writes a PDF exhibit plus pre-filled answers for the county's online appeal form. MIT license, 4 stars, last commit September 7, 2026. Worth an hour because it is the whole appeal pipeline in one readable file against live county data; swapping in another county is the weekend.

The way this build gets gamed is on the invoice, not the appeal. A contingency agent bills a share of the reduction, and the easiest reduction to book never touched the tax bill: in Texas, a homestead's taxable value can be capped, so a large cut to the appraised market value can save the owner nothing, and a firm that bills on the market value cut still sends an invoice. Texas Protax prices that case separately, at $2.50 per $1,000 of value cut, so the firms know the difference. The second way is quieter: an agent authorized to act for the owner invoices year after year against a reduction the county would have granted anyone who asked, and the owner never sees the comparables. The one control that stops both: compute the fee from the two tax bills, the one the notice implied and the one the county sent, show the owner both with the invoice, and let the owner revoke the authorization in one click.

PASS IT ON

The friend who complained about the appraisal notice in April never filed the protest. Forward this before next spring's notice arrives.

NEXT ISSUE

Agents that file homeowners insurance claims. JustClaims puts an AI policy reader beside a licensed public adjuster, on terrain where Florida caps the adjuster's fee at 20% of the payout and 10% for a year after a declared emergency, Texas caps it at 10%, and 5.5% of insured homes filed a claim in 2022 at an average of $18,311. Who writes the estimate, and who keeps the difference.

SOURCES

Ownwell homepage figures · Ownwell pricing page · Ownwell FAQ fee range · Ownwell Series B release · Ownwell homeowner survey · AppealDesk homepage results · AppealDesk about page · O'Connor fee page · O'Connor 2025 savings claim · Texas Protax fee FAQ · HCAD 2023 annual report · Cook County appeals record · NAHB property tax collections · Berry Chicago assessment study · Texas Tax Code 41.44 · Texas Occupations Code 1152 · Dallas Morning News lawsuit · Cook County assessor model repo · Cache repo · New York unclaimed funds page · NAUPA unclaimed property page · Texas Property Code 74.507 · California CCP 1582 · Texas Comptroller refund FAQ · Basis funding report · Auditel contingency model · Sales Tax Helper pricing line · Florida Statute 626.854 · Texas Insurance Code 4102.104 · III homeowners claim facts