Incredibly middle-aged question about home appraisal, taxes, blah

Post date: 2024-04-16 11:41:12

This is a question where I partly don't know what I don't know, so I have to bumble my way toward asking what I'm asking, but essentially I'm trying to figure out what's up with my home appraisal and whether I should be contesting it and, if it's too complicated to answer here, who I should be even asking. This in Texas and I'm not sure to what extent the question is localized.

So basically
-bought a house last year
-applied for the homestead exemption (is this a Texas thing?) which shields some of the value of your home from taxation ok btw I swear I'm not a libertarian who doesn't want to pay any taxes but anyway...
-paid my taxes last year
-was told by a friend that you should contest your appraisal every year just because it keeps your housing costs from creeping up too much
-received my appraisal for 2024

There's a bunch of stuff that seems vaguely wtf about it to me but part of it is just that I live in a housing market that really fucking popped off in the last few years. Looking online at past appraisals it looks like the appraisal went something like

2021: appraisal 200K, Value Limitation Adj* 15K, appraised net 185K
2022: appraisal 270K, Value Limitation Adj 75K, appraised net 200K
2023: appraisal 310K, Value Limitation Adj 90K, appraised net 220K
(I bought it in January 2023)
2024: appraisal 295K, Value Limitation Adj 50K, appraised net 245K

*I think this is the homestead thing but....no explanation on site!

There's another column called Improvement that tends to be like 150-250K every year and doesn't affect the net so I don't even know with that.

I realize this is a lot of detail but I've fudged it some and most likely we don't know each other so I feel ok about it. It also seems like asking about something dry and complicated, but I find usually someone is like "no, this is just a thing and after you've done it once, you get it." But basically: do I contest this even though the appraisal went down (though the net didn't)? But also kind of wtf is up with this

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