Ask anyone who handles Indiana assessment appeals professionally and they'll tell you the same thing: cases are won in the preparation, not at the hearing. And the preparation is fundamentally a data workflow — pulling the right records from the right systems, in the right order, and assembling them into a story a PTABOA member can follow in five minutes.
Here's that workflow, including which software holds each piece of evidence. It's the process behind our tax appeal service, and it's entirely runnable by a determined homeowner.
Step 1: Verify the Record Card (the Cheapest Win)
Before touching valuation, verify the county's facts. Pull the property record card from your county assessor's portal and check every measurable claim: square footage, story count, basement finish, garages, outbuildings, land types and acreage, grade and condition.
Factual errors are common — data entry, imagery misreads, never-removed demolitions — and they're the strongest possible appeal: no opinion of value required, just a tape measure and photos. Our record card guide itemizes what each field means.
Step 2: Pull the Comps
Indiana assessments target market value-in-use, so the core evidence is what comparable properties sold for around the valuation date. The data sources, best first:
- Sales disclosure data — every arm's-length sale in the state generates an SDF record; STATS Indiana publishes the dataset, and county portals surface parcel-level sales.
- County GIS portals — Beacon/Elevate counties show recent sales with property characteristics, letting you match on age, size, and style.
- Unified tools — our property lookup and Indiana explorer put parcel characteristics, AV history, and provenance in one view, which is what you want when screening a dozen candidate comps.
Selection discipline beats volume: three to five sales, same market area, similar size/age/condition, near the January 1 valuation date, arm's-length only (screen out the family transfers and foreclosures the SDF flags as non-arm's-length). The full selection method is in our comparable sales evidence guide.
Step 3: Run the Equity Check
A second, independent line of attack: how is your parcel assessed relative to comparable neighbors? Pull assessed values for physically similar parcels on your street or in your subdivision. If similar houses carry materially lower AVs per square foot, you have a uniformity argument — and Indiana's burden-of-proof rules make well-documented disparities uncomfortable for the county. County-level assessment quality context (like the COD statistic) tells you how much scatter is normal where you are.
This is the step where software genuinely changes the game: checking ten neighbors manually through a county portal is an afternoon; screening them in a unified dataset is minutes. For income property, add the income approach — the multifamily appeal guide and commercial income-approach guide cover that track.
Step 4: Assemble the Packet
PTABOA members review stacks of appeals per session. The packet that wins is the one that's effortless to follow:
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| One-page summary | Parcel, current AV, requested AV, the two or three reasons why |
| Record card errors | Side-by-side: card says / reality is, with photos and measurements |
| Comp grid | 3–5 sales in a table: address, date, price, size, $/sq ft, adjustments |
| Equity grid | Similar neighbors: AV, size, AV/sq ft |
| Exhibits | Photos, contractor estimates for condition issues, sale documents |
File the Form 130 by your county's deadline, then use the process guides for what follows: what happens after filing, the PTABOA hearing, and escalation to IBTR if needed.
Tip
Software assembles evidence; it doesn't replace judgment. The judgment calls — which comps are truly comparable, what adjustments are defensible, whether your case is $15,000 strong or $50,000 strong — are where prepared filers and professionals separate from the 40%-ish base success rate. Aim the data at a specific, defensible number, not at "lower."
Where This Fits
Appeal preparation is the taxpayer-side layer of the Indiana property tax software stack — consuming data that county CAMA systems and state portals publish. If you'd rather hand off the whole workflow, our tax appeal service runs it — analysis first, so you know whether you have a case before anyone files anything.