We are Maryland residents. We were curious about property taxes. How much are we paying in property taxes, to whom, and for what? This led to further questions about assessments and appeals. How does the Maryland state government come up with assessed values? Are assessments accurate? How does the appeal process work? What makes for a successful appeal? Most fundamentally, how is it that a property's assessed value might not be an accurate reflection of its market value?

Looking for answers, we dug in. We researched everything we could find about property taxes, assessments and appeals in Maryland. We sat in on assessment appeals board hearings. We asked a lot of questions. And, given our data analytics backgrounds, we obtained some of the same data the Maryland state government uses in its assessment work—literally millions of data records—so we could begin to do our own in-depth analyses.

Some things became very clear to us. Property tax bills tend to be impenetrable—most homeowners can't make sense out of how their property taxes are computed or where their property tax dollars go. A surprising number of properties have assessments which don't reflect their market value. Few homeowners appeal their assessments. The appeal process can be difficult to understand. Anyone who does appeal typically finds themselves at a marked disadvantage, given their lack of familiarity with the process and lack of access to the information and resources available to the state government.

The idea to start a business dedicated to helping Maryland homeowners emerged.

Every homeowner should be sure their property is fairly assessed and they're paying their fair share of property taxes. Our work is about informing and empowering Maryland homeowners while, at the same time, bringing greater transparency and accountability to government.