Property tax analytics, Austin Texas
Texas counties value hundreds of thousands of homes at once using statistical models. Those models make systematic errors — and most homeowners never find out. Abately reverse-engineers the math, identifies where your property was over-assessed, and hands you the evidence to fight back.
The problem
Every year, your county appraisal district uses a statistical process called Multiple Regression Analysis (MRA) to value hundreds of thousands of properties simultaneously. They’re not sending an appraiser to your door. They’re feeding square footage, lot size, year built, and dozens of other attributes into a model that outputs a number — your assessed value.
These models are blunt instruments. They’re calibrated on aggregate data, which means individual properties fall through the cracks. Miscoded attributes. Bad comparable sales. Model drift in fast-moving submarkets. The county doesn’t catch it — and neither do most homeowners.
Most people either accept the number quietly or hand 40% of their savings to a protest mill that files a generic complaint and hopes for the best. There’s a better way.
The numbers don’t lie
How Abately is different
Legacy protest firms file volume paperwork and negotiate settlements. We take a fundamentally different approach: we analyze the county’s own model to find where it went wrong on your specific property — and we give you the evidence to prove it.
We pull your county appraisal district’s dataset and reconstruct the MRA model behavior for your property’s neighborhood and class. This isn’t guesswork — it’s applied data science using the same inputs the county used.
Miscoded attributes. Inappropriate comparable sales. Statistical outliers. We surface the specific, documentable reasons your property was over-valued — the kind of evidence that holds up in an Appraisal Review Board hearing.
You receive a hearing-ready evidence report in plain English — not a generic complaint letter. Walk into your informal protest or ARB hearing with the math already done, and with quantified estimates of your likely tax savings.
Under the hood
This section is for the readers who want to know exactly how the sausage is made — engineers, finance professionals, and real estate investors who can smell a hand-wavy pitch from a mile away.
County appraisal districts publish their sales ratio studies and methodology documentation. We use that alongside neighborhood-level transaction data to approximate the coefficient weights the model applies to property attributes — square footage, age, condition, location adjustments, and more. When a property’s modeled value diverges significantly from what the model should produce, that’s a signal worth investigating.
The model is only as good as its inputs. We cross-reference county records against permit data, deed records, and on-the-ground characteristics to identify miscoded attributes — an extra bedroom that doesn’t exist, a condition rating that was never updated, a lot size pulled from a stale parcel dataset.
Appraisal districts select comparable sales to anchor their valuations. We evaluate whether those comparables are genuinely comparable — same submarket, similar structure, recent enough to be relevant. When the county anchors to outlier sales or pulls comps from dissimilar neighborhoods, we document the discrepancy with precision.
Sometimes the issue isn’t a single miscoded field — it’s a systemic modeling error that pushed an entire street or subdivision too high. We flag these using distribution analysis and assess whether your property sits in a cluster of over-assessed homes, which strengthens the case considerably at an ARB hearing.
Who we help
Abately launches with deep coverage in four high-growth Texas counties where appraisal volatility has been most pronounced. Our platform is built to expand — but right now, if you own property in any of these counties, you’re in the right place.
Austin metro. Rapid appreciation, aggressive assessments, and some of the highest protest success rates in the state for well-documented cases.
Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown. Fast-growing suburbs with frequent model lag between market movements and appraisal updates.
Kyle, Buda, San Marcos. Newer development corridors where county parcel data is often incomplete or inaccurate.
San Antonio metro. Large assessment rolls and high volume create the exact conditions where modeling errors compound across entire neighborhoods.
Not in one of these counties yet? Join the early-access list and we’ll notify you when coverage expands to your area. More Texas counties are on the roadmap.
You’ve seen the notice, you suspect something is off, but you don’t trust a firm that wants 40% of savings you haven’t seen yet. You want to understand the case before you commit to anything. Abately was built for you.
Agents, financial advisors, and property managers: Abately is a referral tool your clients will thank you for. When a client’s tax burden looks off, send them our way — we’ll give them a clear-eyed read before they act.
About
Abately was founded by a technologist with nearly thirty years of experience in enterprise architecture and data systems — including tenures at Microsoft, IBM, and Dell. The observation that catalyzed Abately was straightforward: county appraisal districts use the same class of statistical modeling deployed in enterprise analytics environments, but homeowners are expected to challenge those models with no tooling, no transparency, and no data access.
That asymmetry is the problem Abately exists to fix. We’re independently owned, Austin-based, and built on the belief that if the county used a model to assess your property, you deserve to see exactly where that model went wrong.
We are not a protest mill. We don’t take a percentage of your savings. We’re a data service — our job is to surface the truth about your assessment, clearly and completely, and put the decision in your hands.
Enter your address for a preliminary check, or join the early-access list to be first in line when Abately launches in your county. No commitment. No percentage of your savings. Just the data.
