FreeTaxProtest

Problem

Chandler Crouch, a licensed Texas property-tax consultant, wanted to offer free tax protests to homeowners over-assessed by county appraisal districts, removing the friction of a process built on a fixed annual deadline, valuation evidence most owners can't assemble themselves, and government portals never built for the public. The constraint was scale: doing by software what a consultant normally does by hand for a few dozen clients, for tens of thousands.

Solution

We built the system that runs the entire protest pipeline: an authorization lifecycle that tracks agent sign-off through county matching and routes exceptions (bad signatures, ownership mismatches, county-side errors) to the right resolution instead of a generic rejection; a regression-based valuation engine over MLS/IDX/RESO and county data that estimates fair market value against the assessment; an ML risk-scoring model that prioritizes which protests have the most to gain; and Puppeteer-based browser automation that files and tracks protests directly against county appraisal-district portals with no public API. Ticketing, approval workflow, and triggered homeowner communications keep tens of thousands of cases moving without manual tracking, on Dockerized services running on Kubernetes built to absorb millions of requests a month during protest season and sit quiet the rest of the year.

Outcome

The platform represents 90,000+ homeowners through a single annual filing cycle, cut manual appraisal research time by 75%, and drove a 150% increase in qualified leads after launch, with zero unplanned downtime through peak season. It's also the anchor of an ongoing relationship: what started as one engagement grew into the CRM and appraisal-automation infrastructure covered in the ChandlerCrouch and StartDeck case studies.