Par Residential Llc

Scott, a long life cycle has nothing to do with not returning phone calls and emails. I was calling because I needed to speak with someone specifically about an aspect of my appeal. You and your office CONSISTENTLY avoided my emails and phone calls. I still haven’t talked to you about my appeal, Scott. You responded to my Unilocal review before you even responded to me. My appeal was a complete mess due to your company’s incompetence. I am still working with the Board of Equalization to clean up your mess. The correct way to respond to this type of complaint is to fix it, not post a response on Unilocal blaming the government.

Overall, this service took away my control of the appeals process, but didn’t provide enough feedback to make me comfortable with the work they were doing. For that reason, I do not particularly recommend it.
I have been working with this service in 2015, and I have found it has not addressed the needs I hoped it would. I hoped it would allow me to not worry about my assessment at all. Instead, it has increased my worry. In retrospect, it would have been less hassle to handle it myself.
Here’s why:
1. They don’t provide any automated communication about what they are doing. You sign a contract saying that they may or may not appeal, but they wait until the very last moment to tell you whether they are going to appeal or not. My assessment increased 19%, so much that the county actually visited my house in person to warn me, but as of early June PAR cannot tell me whether they will appeal until July 1^st. That leaves me only two weeks to appeal myself if they don’t. I am not clear if they will provide me with some explanation for why they didn’t appeal.
2. I spoke with the owner, and he stated that he couldn’t know whether he would appeal because the ‘values are not final until July 1.’ However, I have a letter dated May 26^th from the county that clearly shows my prior and current assessed value. I can decide whether to appeal based on that, but PAR says that number is not reliable until July 1, when they will make a decision. Clearly, the county sends out that letter with the intent that it will be the basis for home owners to appeal (it has appeal instructions on the back), so I don’t know why it isn’t adequate for PAR to make a determination.
As a result of this review, the owner called me, and stated that he was irritated with me because, ‘I clearly did not understand how the appeals process works.’ I don’t, that is why I hired PAR.
Unfortunately, PAR has not created a process that educated me on the value PAR is adding, and has given me no sense whether they will appeal. The owner stated that they already have a number at which they will appeal my house, but they do not provide that number in advance of the July 1 date.
Consequently, I am just left to wait and hope that I will be amongst the 50−60% of homes where they appeal, and that that appeal will yield a reduction. If they decide not to appeal, it still isn’t clear whether they will explain to me why, but I will only have about 2 weeks to construct my own appeal if I disagree (or if I just don’t know what they did, because they didn’t communicate a reason).
If you want a black box appeal process, where you give PAR ½ the savings if they appeal and win, and are happy to assume the case was unappealable if they do not, then it might work for you. But if you are expecting to have advance notice of what they are doing, or a sense of what work they did prior to reaching their determination, they do not seem to have the infrastructure in place to provide it. You give up control when you sign their contact, and after that you are flying blind.
What I wish they would have done is this: As soon as they process your house, email you the value they think your house should have (say $ 400K) and the current county assessment (say $ 500K). They could qualify it by saying that the county might revise its number until July first, but it gives you a sense of where they are.
This would give you a sense of how likely they are to appeal. It would give you a sense of what the savings would be if they were successful. It would be really simple to implement. But right now, they do not do that.
Update: 7÷7÷2015: Still have not heard anything from this company. No communication at all.
Update 7÷9÷2015: I got an email from this company with a form letter saying our house was ‘Equitably assessed — case closed.’ There is no explanation as to why they think that, no supporting documentation, no insight at all. They provide no helpful information during or after the process as to why they think your house cannot be appealed. I really regret using this service, and will not do so again.