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Comment by aarondf | Hacker News Reader

In Texas, the county puts a value on your house that then determines how much you pay in taxes.

Usually they just kinda eyeball it. The homeowner is allowed to protest and say "hey that's super wrong, I protest!" It's a pretty broken system tbh.

We are property tax agents that homeowners hire to do that "protesting" process for them. IF we save them money, we get paid a percentage of the realized savings. If we save them nothing, we get paid $0.00, so it's a pretty compelling offer.

As for conversions, it's extremely hard to track because it's physical mail. But yes, the campaign did quite well!

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I don't think you answered the questions: Why was handwriting necessary? Are people more likely to read your mail if it has a handwritten envelope?

My question would: Isn't it faster to just have some people write the addresses per hand?

... I would take "this is cooler" as an answer :-)

> Are people more likely to read your mail if it has a handwritten envelope?

That is the theory!

> My question would: Isn't it faster to just have some people write the addresses per hand?

Undoubtedly, yes! Our plan was to try to make it a service pre-covid, but then we decided to double down on our main product (doing tax protests).

There are lots of services out there that do this, but mostly they do low volume, high cost stuff

- https://www.handwrytten.com/

- https://www.scribeless.co/

- https://roboquill.io/

- https://handwrittenmail.com/

- https://letterfriend.com/

Lots of stuff like thank you notes, etc. We just wanted the addresses on the outside!

I LOVE your project and delighted in reading about it. But your offer is so compelling I doubt you need the fake handwriting.

It shouldn't be that hard to track conversion rates?,

You could run A/B tests on randomized populations, to see relative performance of conventional methods to yours, keeping other factors like packaging, contents of the leter same ?

You could even probably track basis demographic/ economic groups given that you are tracking home value, you have both property tax and location data with which to control for.

Whether you should do is a different question

Ah yeah I guess I shouldn't have said it that way.

I'll rephrase: "It's hard for me, as the individual developer at a company, to spend enough time to devise a system to adequately A/B test the production and distribution of physical mail as compared to link clicks."

So the tax equivalent of the lawyers that advertise on tv that they don't get paid unless you win.

Yes, in the sense that we don't get paid unless we win.

No, in the sense that we don't advertise on TV and we don't call ourselves The Texas Hammer [1]

1: https://twitter.com/JIMADLERLAWFIRM

That is a weird way to tax property.

I still don't understand why you needed this autograph pencil?

It is, I agree.

We used them to write the addresses on the envelopes.

> I still don't understand why you needed this autograph pencil?

To trick people into opening their junk mail, because they think it's a letter from a human.

Ah yes.

I have gotten these before, but not produced this way. The ones I got looked like they were written by an underpaid employee.

They have had signature machines for years though. The Kennedy's used them a lot.

The only thing I would experiment with this project is adding significant error, and randomness to the writing. It would look more realistic?

On a personal note, when I get these (Anderson Painting likes this approach.); I throw away the ad away immediately, or if printed on good stock paper--I save to pick up dust.

Pick up dust, that's an interesting comment. How does stock paper help with that?

Not sure if it's the same thing, but heavy cardstock is great at collecting dust off a flat surface - for some reason it sticks to the edge.

Is it? How do other states do it? Here in the Netherlands it's the same, roughly judged based off average values in the neighborhood.

Same in Canada.. always seemed fair enough to me and I assumed it was standard but now I'm curious how many other ways they are and how they shake out.

As for fair:

There is little thought given to how much the individual house is worth, rather it relies on comp sales in the area. For example, a fully renovated house might go for $500k, but another in the neighborhood with the same number of bedrooms and bathrooms in a less desirable location (say the entrance to the neighborhood) might only be able to sell for $400k.

It is also very common for the adjustments upward to be far quicker than adjustments downward.

Then there are definitely examples out there of the city appraised value being driven by desired tax revenue and becoming detached from the reality of sale prices.

In my locale, the assessment is pegged to the sale price, so if you buy a house for $X, the assessed value becomes $X. The city assessor also inspects the house shortly after the sale. In an area with a lot of turnover, the assessments tend to be fairly accurate. A major renovation (requiring a permit) will result in a re-assessment.

In subsequent years, they're supposed to apply a formula, but of course "drift" can occur. And then there's an appeal process.

> A major renovation (requiring a permit) will result in a re-assessment.

Doesn't this just incentivize people to not pull permits on major work? In California contractors often try to talk you out of getting a permit because it's more of a hassle for them, so clearly the contractors aren't liable for doing unpermitted work...

It does, but it's usually the contractor who pulls the permit for you. I suspect enforcement is enough of a deterrent, but who knows. As I understand it, the penalty is that you get to rip out whatever was built without a permit.

For DIY'ers, there's actually a nice program... once you pull a permit, you get to talk with the code inspectors during their office hours, and they will walk you through everything you need to do in order to meet code. A friend of mine built an entire addition this way.

There's no way to hack-proof any taxation mechanism.

That's really nice. Here they just show up after the fact, tell you the first thing they find wrong and then leave.

If it's not to code, it can take many visits to get a full list of issues.

In CA, your tax is around 1 percent of the sales price.

If you remodel, you are suspose to have your property reassessed.

In California, your value is nominally bound to the actual value (i.e. it can be reassessed at any time). However, given that prices go up faster than the limits on raising assessed value in Proposition 13, in reality the tax is effectively "Sales price plus MIN(Inflation, 2%) per year"

My current house was being taxed at a value of 1/8 of what I paid for it.

It's a pretty common way to tax property.

All a town or county is looking for is a somewhat equitable way to split up the bill for the total tax income it wants to collect each year. All that matters is that every property's relative value is reasonably fairly assessed, and the tax rate is then set based on the amount of funds the local government budgets, with the portion each household pays being weighted based on assessed value.

All that happens if an individual homeowner argues down their appraisal is that everybody else's taxes go up by a bit.

If everybody successfully argued their house was 10% overvalued, all the assessments would go down, the tax rate would go up, and they'd all be right back where they started for tax bills.

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