3 ms·

This would be a perfect motto for property tax assessments. It is ridiculous that no one has any idea if the value of their home is inflated/deflated by softwar

• prepend 5y ago
  My county purchased a service that automatically estimated values. It was a black box to them. During my appeal, they weren’t able to describe how it chose to raise property assessments on which properties as it wasn’t done on every house. They wouldn’t even reveal the vendor. They were getting a ton of appeals because they switched from a manual, poorly coordinated process to an automated process powered by a third party. It was very frustrating because the citizen review board accepted the appraiser’s number even though they couldn’t describe the methods and even though I brought dozens of comps showing a lower price and valuation of actual sales. They fixated on the number that the software produced. I think if software should be used like this it needs to be auditable and at least source available, if not foss.