The Watchdog reports how property tax company Ownwell charges customers 25% of what they save for filing your homestead exemption for you. Here’s the problem. Filing exemptions like that for primary residence owners and also for older adults and disabled persons is free. So why would you pay for that?
If you don’t know if you have the exemption, check your property tax notice which may have arrived in the mail in recent days. Or go to your appraisal district’s website and look up your property. You could call, but I hear wait times in some appraisal districts can be up to an hour.I despise the title of homestead exemption because it can be difficult to understand. But you get to take $100,000 off of your appraised value and you pay taxes on what’s left.
The BBB revoked the A+ rating in February because of “the failure by the business to adhere” to BBB standards.Here’s one more red flag about Ownwell. Company executives ignored The Watchdog’s multiple requests for an interview to go over these findings. I made several calls to their public phone number and sent a backup online message. No response from two executives listed in the BBB report — CEO Colton Pace and Carolyn Riley, whose title is “head of customer experience.