Georgia Property Tax Appeal Scatter Plots
At my previous job as Director of Analytics at Fidelity Investments, I was particularly fond for creating scatter plots. For each retirement plan, we would graph each individual employee saving for retirement by their personal rate of return or percent equity allocation vs. age. Lots of insights were discovered about 401(k) participant behavior. I would be remiss if I did not create some scatter plots for property tax appeals here at Hallock Law LLC.
Average Appeal Amount ($) vs. Percent of Parcels Appealed, 2020
Percent of parcels appealed is along the x-axis (horizontal). The average amount ($) of those appeals is plotted on the y-axis (vertical). The size of the circle is the number of property tax appeals made in the county in 2020. I’ve also shaded metro Atlanta counties (15) green and all other Georgia counties blue (144). That’s four dimensions of data (position (X & Y), size, and color) for all 159 counties in Georgia - in one graph. These graphs include both residential and commercial property tax appeals.
Average Appeal Amount ($) vs. Percent of Parcels Appealed, 2019
Many of the smaller counties are clustered in the bottom left corner of the graph - low appeal rates and low average appeal amounts. Some counties can extend out along one of the axes, either uncharacteristically high appeal rates (perhaps after a county-wide revaluation) or high average appeal amounts (perhaps due to a few large commercial appeals) in any given year. A few larger counties can find themselves in the middle of the graph with both higher-than-average appeal rates and average appeal amounts (which is more a function of the higher average parcel value to begin with).
Average Appeal Amount ($) vs. Percent of Parcels Appealed, 2018
Average Appeal Amount ($) vs. Percent of Parcels Appealed, 2017
Similar graph to the one above with the positioning of some of the larger counties (e.g. Fulton County, DeKalb County, Cobb County, Gwinnett County, Clayton County, and Chatham County) in their positions in the middle of the plot (both higher-than-average appeal rates and average appeal amount). Along the horizontal axis (x-axis), is a rotating group of counties generally with higher appeal rates following a county-wide revaluation. Muscogee County had an astounding 16.2% of parcels appealed in 2017. This was up from 0.8% in the year prior (2016) and it went back down to 2.0% in next year (2018).
Notes: We used data from the Georgia Department of Revenue to put together these property tax appeal statistics. This data was submitted to the Georgia Department of Revenue by tax assessors from all 159 Georgia counties. Metro Atlanta is defined (by Hallock Law LLC) as 15 counties: Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, Forsyth, Cherokee, Fayette, Clayton, Henry, Bartow, Hall, Paulding, Douglas, Rockdale, and Coweta. While this definition seems expansive, it is actually much smaller than the Atlanta metropolitan statistical area (MSA) definition provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, which includes 29 counties. Did you know that Georgia has the second most number of counties (159) of any state? Texas is first with 254.
About the Author
Bryan Hallock, founding partner, escaped his data analytics job of 15 years at Fidelity Investments to pursue a new career as a small business owner. He earned his J.D. and M.B.A. from Georgia State University but will always be a Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech.
Bryan Hallock, Founding Partner | Property Tax Attorney. Photo by Katie Weeks Photo LLC