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