CARS Appraisal Commercial Real Estate Software

Information may not be reliable

O’Connor is a large property tax consulting firm handling over 200,000 property tax appeals in 24 states annually. Their practice includes coordinating over 4,000 judicial appeals (lawsuits in district court). O’Connor engages outside experts who use CARS to prepare narrative appraisals for about two-thirds of these cases.

The experts retained by O’Connor use CARS (Commercial Assessment Report System) to complete reports for litigation, signed by an appraiser with the Appraisal Institute designation (i.e. Ryan Mill, MAI) for a cost below $500 per narrative appraisal. This is perhaps 20% of the typical pricing for a bank narrative appraisal, which requires a lower level of diligence than an appraisal for litigation. The average time to complete an appraisal is less than 4 hours; dramatic time savings compared to the traditional method of using and Word and Excel combination.

The ability to obtain expert reports at 20% of what our competitors pay (or less) empowers O’Connor to coordinate judicial appeals for more property owners. For example, the average value of a property the subject of a Texas judicial appeal was $13,436,335 (for accounts settled in 2018).

Because of the cost efficiencies of appraisals and other factors, O’Connor is able to coordinate judicial appeals for commercial properties with a value in excess of $750,000, only 5.6% of the assessed value of the average judicial appeal. O’Connor’s competitors typically consider judicial appeals for properties starting at $5,000,000 to $10,000,000. The efficiencies of CARS are an important factor in allowing O’Connor to more aggressively represent their clients by challenging more accounts through the entire appeal process.