Why I Built FairPath

In Harris County, Texas, 68% of homeowners do not protest their property tax assessments.

That's not because their valuations are accurate. It's because the process is confusing, time-consuming, and designed in a way that quietly discourages participation.

The result: an estimated $248 million in potential savings goes unclaimed every year in a single county.

I built FairPath because that number bothered me — and because the existing options for doing something about it don't actually solve the problem.

The two options that don't work

Today, a homeowner who thinks their property is over-assessed has two choices.

Option one: do it yourself. Pull comparable sales from public records. Figure out which adjustments are defensible. Format the evidence in a way that an appraiser will actually review. Navigate the county's filing process, which varies by jurisdiction and changes without much warning. Most people start this process, realize how much work it is, and stop. That's the 68%.

Option two: hire a contingency firm. Companies like O'Connor and Associates or Ownwell will handle the protest for you — and charge 25–50% of whatever tax reduction they achieve. On the surface, this sounds reasonable. You only pay if you save money.

The problem is in the math. In Texas, homesteaded properties are subject to a 10% annual cap on assessed value increases. That means a contingency firm can reduce your market value by $40,000 — triggering a fee of $250 to $500 — while your taxable value doesn't change at all. Your tax bill stays the same, and you still owe the firm. This is the phantom fee problem, and it's baked into how contingency pricing works. The firm did exactly what it promised. You just didn't save anything.

Neither option serves the homeowner in the middle: someone who owns a $500K+ home, suspects they're over-assessed by a moderate amount, and wants a professional-quality protest without paying a percentage of savings they may never see.

What I actually noticed

I'm finishing a Master's in Accounting at UMKC, with a focus on how financial systems work in practice. Before FairPath, I operated a 400-lot mobile home park and an 800-unit self-storage portfolio. I've lived inside property valuations — not as an abstraction, but as a line item that directly affects operating income, cap rates, and investment returns.

What struck me, after years of working with assessed values, is that the property tax appeal process is fundamentally a document preparation problem. The data is public. County appraisal districts publish comparable sales, assessment methodologies, and property records. The evidence that supports a protest already exists — it just needs to be identified, organized, and formatted in a way that meets the county's submission requirements.

That's not legal advice. That's assembly.

I filed my own property tax appeal this year — and it reinforced how broken and opaque the process is. The comparable sales data was available but scattered. The filing requirements were buried in county websites that hadn't been updated in years. The process assumed either that you already knew what you were doing or that you'd hire someone who did. There was no middle path.

What FairPath does

FairPath is a document preparation platform. You enter your address, and the system pulls your property's assessed value, identifies comparable sales, calculates a fairness score, and assembles a protest-ready evidence packet — the same kind of package a professional tax consultant would prepare.

The fee is $249, flat. Not a percentage of your savings. Not contingent on the outcome. You pay once, you get your packet, and you file it with the county yourself or through their online portal.

The packet includes five forensic comparable sales with adjustments, an equal-and-uniform analysis (which compares your assessment to similar properties under Texas Tax Code §41.43), an opinion of value, and — where applicable — a condition adjustment based on property-specific defects that mass appraisal systems can't detect at scale. County appraisal districts assess hundreds of thousands of properties every year. They assume average condition. If your roof is 18 years old or your foundation has a known issue, that assumption works against you. FairPath's packet documents what the district can't see from the street.

Every calculation is visible. Every data source is cited. Every comparable is shown with the adjustment methodology. There's no black box. If a homeowner wants to understand why the system selected a particular comp or calculated a particular value, the answer is on the page.

What FairPath is not

FairPath is not a law firm. It does not provide legal advice, and it does not represent homeowners before appraisal review boards. It's a preparation tool — closer to TurboTax than to a tax attorney. The platform relays county rules and filing requirements, assembles evidence from public data, and produces a formatted document. What the homeowner does with that document is their decision.

This distinction matters. The property tax appeal industry has operated for decades on a model where homeowners delegate the entire process — and pay handsomely for it. FairPath's bet is that a significant number of homeowners would rather understand the evidence, control the process, and keep their savings. The data from Harris County — where 88–95% of informal protests with documented evidence result in some reduction — suggests the evidence matters more than who presents it.

Why now

Texas counties mail assessment notices in April and May. Homeowners typically have 30 days from the notice date to file a protest. That compressed timeline is one of the reasons so few people act: by the time you understand what happened to your assessment, research whether it's worth protesting, and figure out how to do it, the deadline is approaching or past.

FairPath is launching in Harris County for the 2026 protest season, with seven additional Texas counties operational: Montgomery, Fort Bend, Brazoria, Galveston, Waller, Collin, and Denton. The platform accepts any US address — for counties outside this initial group, packets are built from ATTOM property data rather than county-specific appraisal district records.

The goal is straightforward: give homeowners the same quality of evidence that a professional firm would produce, at a transparent price, with full visibility into how every number was calculated.

Whether that evidence leads to a reduction depends on the county, the property, and the specifics of the assessment. FairPath doesn't predict outcomes or guarantee savings. It builds the packet. The homeowner decides what to do with it.

FairPath provides document preparation services — not legal advice. For legal questions about your property tax protest, consult a licensed attorney.