Founder of EasyTaxFix Finds Online Property Tax Service Less Appealing, More Complicated, Than Expected

The day after April 15 may not be a time when many folks want to think about taxes, but what if the subject is reducing your taxes?

EasyTaxFix launched its online business last September in a bid to help homeowners throughout San Diego County lower their property taxes. The concept was simple enough. Home prices have fallen sharply since the bubble popped in the California real estate market, and property taxes are calculated as a percentage of the assessed value—generally 1.1 percent before special assessments. But homeowners typically have to file a property tax appeal to ensure that their property tax matches the lower valuation of their home.

The founders of EasyTaxFix, brothers Adam and Jeff Berkson, created a Web site, EasyTaxFix.com, to automate the process by enabling homeowners to submit the required appeal forms electronically to their county assessor’s office for a $40 fee. The brothers started off by testing the concept just in San Diego.

But when I wrote about the startup in November, the Web site was getting little traffic and the Berkson brothers were unsure if their business would succeed. Of course, another factor is that San Diego County homeowners can appeal the assessed value of their property for free, by filing a form available at any assessor’s office or downloading it from www.SDARCC.com.

So I checked back with Adam Berkson yesterday to get an update on how the business is doing.

“We ended up being very successful in San Diego, and based on that, we made the decision to enter other states,” he told me. He said Xconomy’s report on EasyTaxFix, which was followed by a story in the San Diego Union-Tribune, prompted thousands of people to check out the EasyTaxFix Web site.

In February, the Berksons launched

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.