Transcript: Episode 15 – Chris Bates, Property Consultant Interview

Chris Bates Property Tax Consultant Interview

Speaker 2 (00:22.702)
Chris has over 35 years of experience in Florida property tax consulting, helping property owners, including high end custom home clients, minimize their tax burden through appeals, strategy, and expert navigation of the assessment process. His firm has represented a wide range of property owners from commercial businesses to luxury homeowners, personally preparing and presenting appeals across Florida. What makes Chris’s expertise especially valuable to our listeners is how property taxes are assessed on custom-built homes. The appraisal process often uses standardized price per square foot data that can significantly undervalue what was actually spent to build, creating a unique opportunity for homeowners to save. Chris has made a career out of understanding and navigating that system for the benefit of his clients. Welcome, Chris, to the Insider’s Guide to Custom Homes.

Thank you, Rick. Glad to be here.

So Chris, can you start by sharing a little bit about your background and how you got started in the property tax consulting business and what inspired you to launch MyFloridaPropertyTaxes.com?

Certainly. The way I started was back in the 80s. My mother was working for the local county property appraiser and I ended up meeting an individual at that office while she was working there and he told me that he was able to…

Speaker 1 (01:51.574)
represent a shopping mall owner, take them golfing, take them to dinner, and negotiate the value of the property that saved the owner a lot of taxes, and he got paid to do it. So I immediately got involved with that company, and they offered me a job a few months later as an apprentice. And so I’ve been doing this type of work ever since, and I feel kind of like Robin Hood when I save someone taxes.

But of course they get to pay me a percentage or contingency as well.

So you were apprenticing. How long were you there before you decided to go on your own?

So I worked for this wonderful company for maybe 10 years before I felt comfortable enough and knowledgeable enough to take it on my own. And I’ve been very successful on a local and statewide level. So it’s very good.

Well, that’s great. So now you’re 35 years in the business and you’ve handled virtually every type of property. What keeps you passionate about property consulting and what’s your attention towards helping custom homeowners specifically?

Speaker 1 (03:01.272)
So the custom homes are an interesting group of clients. They usually get a great benefit by not purchasing a home and recording the sale price because most property appraisers will appraise the property based on a percentage of the sale price. When a custom built home is assessed, they use, as you mentioned earlier, lower than normal.

per square foot rates to determine what the cost value might be of a typical home. And we found that the benefit might be as much as reduce the value by as much as 40 % because we found that after the custom home has been assessed for several years and it sells on the open market, the assessment is about 60 to 65 % of what that sale price was. So it truly is a real indicator that

that it’s a benefit to the custom home owner.

So to clarify, if I was going to out look at two homes, one house is $15 million, turnkey, move in tomorrow, I’m going to get assessed on whatever that selling price is. If I buy a custom home, the property appraiser really doesn’t have a record of what I spent because I purchased a lot myself. I hired a general contractor. The property appraiser is not privy to that contract. So they have to use another metric, which is the advantage of building a custom home from scratch because of what you had mentioned earlier.

earlier that it now comes to what is used as a basis for that per square foot rate. So the square foot rate for Broward County say for average home would be about what today.

Speaker 1 (04:48.558)
could be 200 to $350 a square foot might be a typical rate for a standard house in Broward County.

We’re in the construction, you could be spending $800 a square foot, $1,200 or more.

A custom home could be 800 to $1,500 a square foot. And these days, a custom home includes so many built-ins that include features and upgrades that are not captured in that standard assessment that’s made by the property appraiser.

Right, so when I buy a home, custom built, I move into it, property praser doesn’t know what’s there, how does the property praser go about assessing my property? I think they can come to your property and walk around, but what else can they do?

certainly can so they inspect properties physically and they can walk around the property if it’s gated you know they they don’t have the right to actually go through the gates and walk around and look in the backyard to see what improvements have been made.

Speaker 2 (05:57.058)
If I have a gate in front of my property and I’m fully surrounded, they can’t be climbing a fence or just opening a gate and walking in.

They would also rely on building permits. They would rely on building plans. They would rely on aerial photography. And they would identify new features of the house, swimming pool, canopies, things of that nature. But if it’s a lot of fixtures, plumbing and light fixtures, those are supposed to be exempt from taxation if they’re personal items.

So what’s the definition of a fixture? Is a built-in custom wall unit a fixture or is that a permanent part of the home?

So that sometimes is a gray area, like a movie theater, if they’re built in a movie theater. That’s an added feature that’s not going to be typically picked up by the property appraiser because it has a lot of electronics, a lot of sound, buffering walls and things that are special. So special things are, in most of these cases, anything that can be removed from the property without damaging the item or the property itself.

So if they see a movie theater on the set of plans that they’re looking at, they’re not going to say, well, they must have X number of dollars worth of.

Speaker 1 (07:12.27)
of software.

chairs, furniture, screens. Exactly. That’s not that’s really not part of their assessment.

can’t be part of it and should not be. It’s supposed to be just the bricks and mortar and the hard physical aspects of the real estate. So generators would not be included, software, lighting fixtures, big fancy chandeliers or other type of lighting that may cost.

more than the normal, typical, standard home. So these are all things that, again, would be installed but may not be picked up by the local property appraiser due to the custom nature of the house.

Okay, so when you get your first property tax bill, which is called the trim notice, I believe, what happens then? What do you recommend for a first, when you’ve just moved in that house, you’ve lived there for a few months, and then this time of year, which is August, you get a trim notice and you see it’s X dollars, you go, whoa, that’s more than I thought I’d pay. What happens then? What do you do?

Speaker 1 (08:03.598)
That’s right.

Speaker 1 (08:19.448)
Okay, so the property appraiser has been working from January 1st to July to build and develop the new tax roll. August, mid-August, they always issue the trim notice, truth and millage. They give every property owner 25 days to either accept that value or they can file a challenge with the county, another department that accepts the challenges, schedules hearings in order to appeal or challenge the proposed tax that’s been issued.

So.

That’s I guess where you come in and you sit there and you advocate for your clients. How do you prepare to meet with the property appraiser? Is there a hearing? Do you just submit paperwork? Is it an online process? What is your problem?

That’s a good question. the petition is filed, which the petition is the form that is filed with each jurisdiction, sometimes they may charge a small filing fee anywhere from $15 to $50 to file it. What that does is it alerts the Value Adjustment Board to schedule a hearing. While the hearing’s being scheduled, there’s an opportunity to informally meet with the property appraiser and maybe settle the valuation issue.

or the challenge. If you’re unable to resolve it in an informal setting, you will be notified 15 days before or 30 days before your hearing that you’ll need to go to a hearing, present an argument where a special magistrate who is an expert appraiser will determine whether your argument is worthy of reducing the value or if the property appraiser’s value is correct.

Speaker 2 (10:03.692)
how do you go about evaluating each circumstance when you meet with an owner to decide whether it’s worth fighting or it’s not? And what’s your process?

So a lot of times residential properties specifically, they’re more or less valued on a sales comparison approach. They look at sales within the market. They usually use sales within one or two years of the assessment tax year. And so they’re going to use their sales. Hopefully their sales are gonna be all the high sales. My sales are gonna be all the low sales. I look at every property as if it should have never been built. The property appraiser looks at your house

it’s a castle. So the idea is which one of us is correct and how can we come to an understanding of what

So it’s a negotiation?

There’s always a negotiation, even when there’s a special magistrate or a judge proceeding over it. The other issue is that the property appraisers office are professional appraisers and they train and update their licenses every year. They would probably prefer to negotiate that value with somebody who understands appraisal as opposed to maybe a homeowner who is upset about the taxes increasing. So unless you’re a great

Speaker 1 (11:21.2)
appraiser you don’t want to waste your time and the property appraisers office argue a value unless you’re a valuation guy. It’s also it’s not a legal question it’s all value so the taxes are based on the value of your house that’s it.

break.

Go ahead. I wonder.

What could I, what else? What could go?

Speaker 1 (11:54.328)
Yeah, I know you can’t. bet it wasn’t like that last night, I’m sorry. We stayed in a hotel last night. Did you really? Because of the air conditioner. We got a replacement, but apparently it’s not, you know. It’s not. Yeah, no worries, it’s all good. Exactly. It’s going to be fine.

You said the air conditioner was out, huh?

Speaker 2 (12:11.598)
together yet.

Well, it should be cool tonight with this thunderstorm of cool things. All right, so we’re gonna start again and let’s keep on going. And that’s to sync up. Okay, so now that you’re negotiating with the property appraiser and say you don’t come to an agreement, now you go to a board hearing.

So it’s a value adjustment board and they’re also a county department. And the value adjustment board, their only purpose is to arrange for hearings, to hear the grievances of the property owners, and to conduct the hearings in a civil manner in order to reach a resolved value or deny the request.

people are on this board and where do they come from? What were their backgrounds?

there’s generally a clerk that works with the county that records everything and they video and record it and then there’s a single judge. The judge is generally an expert MAI quality appraiser and the judge’s responsibility is to listen to both sides. The property appraiser is presumed correct when they enter the hearing.

Speaker 2 (13:35.822)
before Innocent.

So, yeah, so they’re innocent first and we have to prove that the property appraiser has violated something and done something.

They were on trial, not you.

Yeah, so we’ve got to, yeah, they’re on trial. We’ve got to convince the special magistrate that the property appraiser has somehow made either a mistake, overvalued the property in some way that they feel and were justified to get a settlement that would be a reduction in the value which would result in a reduction in the property.

So how often do you resolve it in the negotiation stage and how often does it have to go to that value adjustment?

Speaker 1 (14:16.398)
on the quality of the argument. If the challenge is really clear, good challenge, you want to go and negotiate that as much as possible. If the challenge is questionable and it’s a 50-50 case, then you want a judge to determine and you hope that maybe the property appraiser’s representative is not on their game at that day at the hearing.

So I guess there are challenges with every business and always and depends on the day I suppose and the quality of your argument. But I think it’s well worth taking the chance and whatever you lock into I believe stays with you as your at least your basis. So that’s why it’s really important to do this when you first get that trim notice the very first year. It’s hard to go backwards. I don’t think you really can. right. So tell us a little bit about

and how that kind of relates to that locking in that value.

The homestead is a very good process for homeowners when their house is their primary residence. They file the homestead in the beginning of the year and it means that have to have the house has to be their primary residence as of January 1st of that year.

Okay, so let me take a scenario. They move into the house on March 15th. Will they get a property tax notice that year for that finished house as a completed structure or are they going to only get taxed on the land value?

Speaker 1 (15:55.149)
Well…

So that part of the question is unique and that the first tax bill on the house when the house’s improvements are first placed on the tax roll, and this is very important for new developments. If you’re the builder and you’re developing a house for an individual and if you’re aware that the property is assessed on January 1st of each year, and if you schedule the completion of the construction to occur in the first quarter, then you may

have a great benefit on the new owners because they may avoid the improvements being added to that year’s tax.

So is there a cutoff January 1, January 30? When how does the property appraiser look at that property and determine if it’s going to go on the tax rolls for that year?

It’s kind of a gray area. January 1 is the date that they determine is the appraisal lien date where they appraise the property. On that day, the property has to be what they call substantially complete, which would be 95 % or 98 % complete.

Speaker 2 (17:04.27)
If the home does not have a CO, does that exempt them from being substantially complete or could it still theoretically be substantially complete?

So in years in the past, a lot of developers thought they were tricking the property appraiser and they would wait till after January 1st to actually get the CO and the property appraiser wised up and said, well, we’re gonna make this a little gray area.

So for our listeners, the CO is a certificate of occupancy. And that’s a document you get from the building department that states that the home is ready to be occupied. That’s right. And that is basically the substantially completion level for the building department, but maybe not for the property appraiser. So again, getting back to the new realization of the property appraisers, they don’t take that CO and say, that’s the date. They look at what?

So a lot of the jurisdictions will rely on the CO, the certificate of occupancy, as a strong, hard number that if it’s after January 1st, the improvements will not be placed on that year’s tax roll. A lot of jurisdictions. And Broward County is…

very close to adopting that philosophy, but there are some situations for larger properties that they have put on, or they put on in phases of development. So they may put on one phase of the property.

Speaker 2 (18:33.41)
Really. So if you live in a property, say, as a main house and guest house and other other sections, they may say, but that main house was done. You were living there. You had made ahead a temporary certificate of occupancy. Yeah. Even though all those other buildings weren’t complete, let’s face it, you were there. We’re putting you on the tax rolls.

And that’s a TCO, which is a temporary certificate of occupancy. And they sometimes can. Broward County has not been that aggressive with that. And I still believe that if the certificate of occupancy was acquired after January, I believe that the improvements would not be placed on that year’s tax rate.

So if you close in February, March, you’re pretty safe.

That’s correct. I believe that you would be very safe and that’s so important to know. It makes a big difference if your house is a larger custom house. It could make a huge difference as to what that year’s taxes are going

Sure, again, being based on value, based on just the land price versus the entire structure. If you close in March or get your CO in March, doesn’t really matter when you move in after that, you’re gonna get a trim notice and typically it’s just gonna be for land. The other situation is say you move in in December, you’re gonna be on those tax rolls and you’re gonna get a trim notice in August and that’s the time you can fight it. again, how does that, so now you fight it.

Speaker 1 (19:32.974)
Exactly.

Speaker 2 (19:57.198)
or you don’t and you’re locked into whatever value that final bill comes in at because you didn’t fight it or you lost your fight or whatever that new amount is, how does that get affected in future years? Can they just randomly increase your taxes based on inflation rate? How do people, what’s the base level that they can raise their taxes on any individual?

Okay, so if you have homestead, there’s limitations and the limitation on a homestead property is either 3 % a year or the CPI, the cost percentage index where the most increase that you can get is 3%.

So if the consumer pricing index is 5 % because of rapid inflation, the is 3. And what if the CPI is 2 %? Does that max out?

The limit is three.

Speaker 1 (20:48.142)
It’s never been 2 % as long as I’ve been in the business. So I don’t even know why they have that as a… So it’s always 3%. It’s always 3%. So that’s the limit it’s going to increase. Now, if you’re not protected by Homestead, the increase, and we’re just talking about the state of Florida, the increase can be whatever the market value…

So you can get really…

It could increase 20 to 50 % if the market, know, a few years ago, the market increased in one year, maybe 35 % in 2021, let’s say.

So that’s why it’s really critical to get that homestead filed. even if you move in in March, doesn’t matter. File that homestead as soon as January 1st comes along, or can you file prior?

Yes.

Speaker 1 (21:32.494)
File it by the end of February of every year. The end of February is the day that is the cutoff date. But if I’m very lenient in the state of Florida, so you can file later, amend it all the way up to almost August. Wow.

Yeah. But if I move in in March of this year, 2025, can I file April, May, June? Or do I have to wait until January?

to until the next year to qualify, but you could qualify, I mean you could file the application for the following year at any time. You just want to make sure you meet that deadline of…

You have to refile when it gets into January 1st or once.

you should be locked in and they’ll continuously maintain your homestead unless you lease the property out or you lose your homestead by you moving it or you change the ownership in the property. Those are all the things that need to be considered.

Speaker 2 (22:30.828)
super important to file your homestead.

is. And if you don’t have homestead and it’s a spare property and you don’t qualify for the homestead, the property value can go up. is a statute in place that is to try to protect individuals who are investing in Florida from out of state. And what they’ve done is they’ve placed another limit, a 10 % limit on the increase of school taxes. And school taxes is almost half

your tax rate. In Florida, in layman terms, the tax rate is close to 2%. So if your tax rate is the value of it’s generally close to 2 % of the total value of your property.

percent of

Speaker 2 (23:20.75)
If you bought a house for $15 million, be prepared. You could be looking at a $300,000 a year. Say that happens. Say I go to the apartment and I a completed home route versus buying a custom to be built route. Can you fight that 2 % saying, I know I closed this house at $15 million, but I think I’m being unfairly adjusted. My neighbors don’t pay that. How can you help?

Exactly.

Speaker 1 (23:49.346)
So there’s no argument in the tax rate. That’s all voted on by the communities. And so we’re all voting on these things and the tax rates established by the town. And so the rates aren’t the argument. The only way to argue this is to argue the value. And you have to argue the value. And I’ll give you an example. I used to represent an eccentric owner. His name was George Wackenhut.

and he had houses that were built like castles. He built a house in Vero Beach. It was 30,000 square feet. It was on the ocean. He bought four lots to build this house in a neighborhood where most houses were built on one lot.

the value of the house was affected because all the surrounding houses were lower quality houses. So it was like a, it was a functional or economic obsolescence where it was a super adequate house that was in a neighborhood that doesn’t.

improved basically.

Over improved, okay? So the county had never seen such a monstrous house. They valued it at say $20 million. And I said, look, you’re gonna need to inspect the house and I want you to come in the house. I’m gonna show you everything, you know.

Speaker 1 (25:10.99)
about the house and of course they reduced the value significantly because I said, who’s he gonna sell this house to? Who’s gonna buy this house? Because a guy that owns a 15 or 20 million dollar house, I don’t know how to say it in a nice way, doesn’t wanna live next to a guy that has a million dollar house. you know, so he’s not gonna be able to sell that house for as much. So it cost him more to build it than he was able to sell for it once he passed away.

Again, he over improved it. So you thought that might be true, but the actual value is not the same. Yeah.

So that’s where you say, well, cost doesn’t translate into value. Just because it costs you 10 or 15 million to build it doesn’t mean the value is going to be. Whereas in the custom homes, the idea is that you build it for 8 million and it’s worth 20, or you build it for 10 million and it’s worth 20.

Whereas you put the improvements on there in a way that their value given to that property is much greater than the cost of that feature.

So do different counties look at property taxes differently? I assume you do this business throughout the entire state of Florida.

Speaker 1 (26:23.95)
I do. I’ve worked all over the country in so many states, but let’s just talk about Florida. 60 some odd counties, 63 counties or 67 counties. There’s not one jurisdiction that operates the same as the other. And as an example, in Broward County, when a property sells, the property appraiser, they want to assess that property at 90 % the first year. Then they’ll work on it going forward. In Palm Beach County,

or Dade County, Miami Dade County, they’re gonna apply at least a 15 % adjustment instead of 10%. So the values are gonna be lower in those other jurisdictions. And so the smaller jurisdictions, there may not be enough transactions to get an idea of what the property should be really worth. They may have to go to another county to get enough sales to do their valuation. So they’re all different.

They all have different problems, whether it be the land, whether it be waterfront or canals, or if they have agricultural, you know, all these things come into play. And I would say that Broward County is pretty aggressive, and Miami-Dade County is the least aggressive in the nicest way.

And they’re all good people. They all work as appraisers and they don’t have it out for any taxes.

a job to do. Yeah, it’s is to raise money to pay for the schools pay.

Speaker 1 (27:59.566)
They’re all, you know, they’re all doing it, trying to get their numbers right. They have oversight. The Department of Revenue looks at all the property appraisers. They do a study every year. They take a sampling of sales. And if their values aren’t at least 85 % of those sales, they’re not going to approve their tax roll.

So they gotta keep it tight. They gotta be up in there and they gotta fight. And so guys like myself, we go in there and we try to get as much removed because we’re an advocate. We’re working for the property owner. We’re not an independent appraiser. We’re not trying to tell anyone what the property is worth. We’re trying to save money for our client.

So it’s interesting you said you work in other states besides the state of Florida which I wasn’t aware of. What’s the differences there other states compared to here. What’s the what’s the kind of most interesting anomaly you’ve seen.

Yeah.

Speaker 1 (28:57.332)
other states they have multiple

multiple methods of fighting it. You can fight it at the tax collector’s level. You can fight it at the property appraiser’s level. You could fight it at a board level or a state level. And so sometimes there’s four different appeals you can do in other states, but also other states may revalue every two to four years. So when they revalue and do a reassessment of everybody’s property, it’s usually a big jump

because it’s four years old and it’s gonna last for four years, so it’s a real big deal. And so a lot of other states do it in a different way and it’s very complicated. The one consistent thing amongst all these states is that most of these states value everything at 100 % fair market value. And then from there on, they could do multiple percentages of taxes

in different methods of taxing people that makes it complicated. I think Florida’s pretty cut and dry. Here’s what your value is. You have one chance to fight it. If you win, good for you. If not, we’ll see you next year. Because in the state of Florida, they reassess every year. And you have a chance to do it each and every year. So it’s a battle, but it’s one that I enjoy.

Great, so you also do commercial work as well.

Speaker 1 (30:31.95)
That’s where a lot of the big properties are. High-rise apartment buildings, probably four or five of the high-rise buildings in downtown Fort Lauderdale. Big shopping centers. For 10 years, I’ve been representing the Simon Malls and helping with their assessment appeals.

at the Brickell City Center which is a mixed-use property that has office, hotel, shopping center, know, retail, so and parking, you know, so it’s every type of property you could ever imagine. I’ve had appeals on called a race course and you know stadiums before so everybody that’s paying taxes are a potential client.

So you need to know a lot about what.

I have a new client this year that’s a recycling business. I’m learning about recycling equipment and things because not only do I negotiate the value of the real estate, I negotiate value of appliance and personal property, equipment. so identifying what the economic life to determine what the depreciation tables would be to apply on these special services and special industries. So it’s interesting. You learn a lot.

So do you have to be licensed to do what you do or is this something just a while?

Speaker 1 (32:00.31)
That’s a great question. the truth is, yes, you have to have at least a real estate license to appraise or determine value of property. That’s one of the…

any realtor with a license. I a college or high school, I my license, can say I’m doing what you do.

And it would be a great way to start, like doing residential properties there. In my opinion, they’re the easier of the type of properties to work on when commercial properties, when you’re working on commercial properties, it’s usually income approach or other methods of appraisal that are a little more sophisticated that require more training.

I’m sure there’s a lot of nuances even the residential side. Give you an advantage of with your 35 years of experience that will probably have a better batting average than someone fresh out.

Residential is great.

Speaker 1 (32:53.518)
That’s for sure. I would say that of the cases that we would take on, we probably have a win ratio greater than 85, probably 90%. So it is, but I’ll tell you, there’s a lot of times that clients will contact us. We’ll review it and we’ll say we’d really like to help you, but we don’t think we can save you money.

That’s amazing.

Speaker 2 (33:19.416)
with me.

I you, don’t be shaking the cage of the property appraisers because he may identify that he’s undervalued you. So in most cases, they can. If they identify that they’ve missed something and let’s say they measured the building wrong or they measured the lot for the land wrong, if they identify a mistake, they can go back up to three years and make a correction and back tax an owner.

So it can come, it can go the other way.

Speaker 1 (33:47.34)
And that’s very serious when it comes to commercial property and or large tangible personal property. Do not, yeah, don’t argue with them unless you’ve really got a good case. And it’s good to have somebody that has a good attitude that they enjoy working with.

So that’s pretty wise advice. Don’t poke the bear.

Speaker 2 (34:05.996)
That’s great. So any final thoughts? Let’s kind of go through what’s your biggest piece of advice for a homeowner managing their own personal property tax liability? I’m going to do it myself. don’t what do I need?

Okay, so nobody knows your house better than you. So if you feel comfortable and you think you know what the value is, in the nicest way, go on in there and tell them what you think. Like I said earlier, I think the property appraiser staff, they want to deal with somebody who understands valuation. But…

If you know what your value of your property is, and if you think you have a good handle on it, there’s nothing that prevents you from going in to talk to the property appraiser one-on-one or filing application that they may have forms to early appeal your property that you could do online.

It’s always good, but if I was to give any advice, it’s not necessarily on the tax appeal side, it’s on the ownership side. If you own a house, you wanna keep your taxes low. if you have, let’s say, the house is in a trust, and if the house is in a trust and there’s several owners, including family members.

You want to make sure that that trust allows for the, when the house is passed on to another member, it’s very important for the trust to have the right of survivorship to avoid resetting your homestead value.

Speaker 2 (35:40.302)
So this is part of tax planning you would typically do with your tax consultant or your attorney or both.

It’s really going to be the attorney should know this. I see, I hear that they don’t advise correctly sometimes, but this is very important for an attorney to know or a family financial planner to know. The homestead laws and rules are very, very sharp and they have to be navigated in a way that your most valuable possession in your

family might be your home and when you pass that home to a family member that you don’t want that especially a bigger house the reset button could be enormous and it could be so big that the individuals that take on the force to sell it yeah they can’t afford it they have to there are ways and that’s so important and setting up the ownership is so important

You don’t want to reset that whole.

Speaker 2 (36:37.006)
So there are ways to avoid that.

Speaker 1 (36:45.23)
because that’s where the tax impact may really hit you the hardest.

you can’t unring the bell.

That’s right. That’s so right. So it’s very important from the from the very beginning. And the ownership is important. I’d say the the tax appeal efforts should begin the moment you start constructing the house, because earlier when we were talking about what’s the impact, the property is when it’s completed. So you need to start from the day you’re starting the development on the house, the construction. You need to know.

of that day when it’s going to be complete.

So I need to start passing around your contact information to my clients when I sign the contract.

Speaker 1 (37:26.99)
You as the developer, you’re the guy that says, we want this to be finished in March or February. So we’re going to have to get you started right away. Or you’re going to have to plan that. And these are reasons.

So there are strategies we should employ through the process. Well, that’s great. So after decades in the field, what’s the most rewarding part of your work?

So I would say the rewarding part is to…

break records and to break records in the size of the reduction that you can achieve for someone. But I would say what I end up doing every year is I give a lot of free advice and I get the best feeling from someone who calls me with not the biggest of houses that has a problem and they can’t afford their property tax. I spend a couple hours on the phone with them. I help them

out they said well how can we pay I really I couldn’t charge them because the only way I’d be able to make a reasonable fee is if I wipe the entire house off the tax roll so I’d say well again I feel like Robin Hood so when I help people that that really need it and I can I could give them some help and it takes an hour of my time that’s enough

Speaker 2 (38:44.866)
So how can they get a hold of you? Go to your website, myfloridapropertytaxes.com.

MyFloridaPropertyTaxes.com. I set that up with the idea that it would be easy to remember when I told somebody what I did. My name is Chris at My Florida Property Taxes. Kind of spells out what I do, so I don’t have to tell you anymore. It’s quite long of an email address or a website, and maybe these days it’s better to have three or four letters, but it spells it out. That is the best way to get in touch with me.

Well, that’s great. So any final thoughts or takeaway messages for our listeners?

The takeaway is always fight your property taxes if you can use a professional. I believe they can get you more savings that will be worth their fee.

Thank you again, Chris, for being here. I really appreciate your advice, and I think our listeners will also appreciate the services and benefit that you can be for them and help them save some, hopefully some money for the first year and then on through the whole time they’re in their homes. And we really appreciate you being our guest here on the Insider’s Guide to Custom Homes. I’m Rick Bell, your host, and until next time, keep learning, keep building, and enjoy the journey.

Speaker 1 (40:05.154)
Thank you, Rick. Look forward to the hot sauce next time.