Travis County Property Tax Protest 2014


I urge each Austinite to protest your property tax this year, just like I urge everybody to each and every year.

The Austin real estate market is still one of the strongest markets in the country. Austin is constantly featured in many top list of places to live in the country. I realize that property taxes are an essential way to pay for City services, I understand. However, the City of Austin needs to live within it’s means, like everybody else is expected to do. I doubt that any news outlet will report on this, but The Travis County Central Appraisal District is so aggressive in their appraisal values this year, in an effort to boost City of Austin and Travis County revenue, that that are actually increasing appraisal values past the 10% capped homestead exemption, as set by the TravisCAD and to be no more than 20% as defined by State of Texas law. However, this is the first year where I have personally noticed that a homestead property has increased, in my case 10.49%. .49, almost a half a percent, just below the half a percent range, to round down and not fully count as any higher than 10%. But we all know that this .49 percent adds up across the hundreds of thousands of Austin area homes. Read more here in the Property Tax Basics.

See past years property tax increases:

  • Texas Tax Protest
  • TravisCad School House

Freeman Properties endorsed vendor, Texas ProTax.

You can always protest yourself, be sure to bring a good argument, photos, and good reasons why your property should be devalued per Travis County appraisal.

Last year, Texas ProTax saved me a total Property Tax savings for 4 combined properties on 19/26/2013 of $1029xxx.59 and a fee of $448xxx.56

More information on Texas Property Tax Assistance.


About admin

I live in Austin the capital of Texas and the self proclaimed “Music Capital of the World” with my lovely wife Jenny and our two beautiful children: our son Garrett, and our daughter Grace. We enjoy being together as a family and with other family in the area. We like to try new food and go to our favorite restaurants. We enjoy travel and try to go to an exciting new place every year, as well as visiting existing favorite locations. I also enjoy pursuing passions such as photography. My wife and I love music and listen to Austin musicians and touring bands as much as we are able to now with the little ones. Volunteer work for SXSW and Old Settlers Music Festival. I operate a consulting business, doing freelance business as Matthew Comer and syphonsoft Web Hosting. I have several projects and long-term clients. I perform consulting to the State of Texas as a Catalog Information Systems Vendor (CISV) and can be found on the Centralized Master Bidders List (CMBL) Vendor ID: 1205325509200. I am a business man and aspiring entrepreneur at heart. I operate several small businesses, Freeman Properties Property Management Company as well as other businesses listed on this site. I am currently employed as a contractor with Titan Solutions providing consulting for IBM. I work on a great team in the PartnerWorld Business Partner portal as a part of the IBM Global Technology Services (GTS) with the IBM Global Channel Enablement (CE) division. I started my seventh consecutive year-long contract in December of 2010. I am doing some amazing work on this team. I had built a system in which editors on the team can create and maintain HTML pages using an XML/XSL integrated WebSphere system. This allows the users to create pages much more easily. I enjoy the work, this is the best work of my career. This system is being sunset and we are migrating our systems to various internal CMS systems. I have taken on a new role of Content Manager for my growing team of India resources. I assign tasks and manage schedules on a daily basis. I am not looking for further employment at this point, but I am always open to hearing about other opportunities. If you are an employer or headhunter and know of a great working remotely employment opportunity that may be a really good fit that closely matches my skill-set, then please view my résumé. However, know that I am not actively looking for new employment, nor would I likely accept other employment at this time. If you are interested in hiring me as an independent consultant, contractor, web developer/designer to develop your website; or to redevelop and rethink your website, as my specialty is redeveloping and maintaining existing sites, then please contact me.