About a month ago, you should have received a letter in the mail regarding the appraised value of your property, asking if you would like to contest this value or not. The deadline to reply to this request is Sept 30th, 2015. There are lots of resources listed in the letter to help with the process and many ways to show that the estimate is to high and needs to be evaluated. For this writer, the easiest way was to go to Realtor.com and lookup my current home and then just below it shows similar homes close by and what they sold for. I printed these out and put them together. I then went to the Cuyahoga County Real Property Information website (I used their experimental GIS property search) and looked up the parcel #, square footage, year built, and number of bedrooms and recorded these all in a spreadsheet.
I had about 5 homes as well as my own. The last row of the spreadsheet displayed the average and I mailed all of this to the County Fiscal Officer with a 3 sentence summary. This did not take more than 30 min, although there may be hearings that I need to attend downtown later on in time. But my experience doing this 10 years ago is that for the money saved it is worth it! In particular in areas that have seen a big decline in home prices over the last few years. You may be able to ask your local realtor for help with this information as well.
Moshe says
What do I do if I didn’t get a letter? Where do I send to?