Why I Walked Away From the Dallas Morning News’ New Property Tax Service

A property tax pro bought a $69 Texas Tax report on his own house. Here’s what he found.

By Glenn Goodrich
Property tax expert and founder of PropertyTax.io

Before I say anything else, you should know where I’m coming from. My name is Glenn Goodrich, and I run PropertyTax.io, a full-service property tax protest agency. The service I’m about to discuss — Tx Tax, a do-it-yourself tool owned by the Dallas Morning News (Hearst) — competes directly with my business. Read what follows through that lens.

A few weeks ago, The Dallas Morning News invited me to sit on a two-person panel at the launch webinar for Tx Tax. I said yes. Then I bought a Tx Tax report on my own home to see what I’d be promoting. After reading it, I told them I couldn’t do the panel.

Here’s why.

The sign-up feels like a bait-and-switch

You’ve probably seen the ads. Type in your address and the site almost always tells you there’s money to be saved on your tax bill. This is a familiar move in my industry — every company claims “technology” and “AI” are the secret sauce, when really it’s the marketing department telling the web team what number it takes to drive sign-ups. The Dallas Morning News has now joined that parade.

Before you can unlock the full report, you’re asked to pay $69. Nowhere in that flow is there a conversation about whether $69 is actually worth spending. There’s no mention of homestead caps. No mention of frozen taxes for over-65 homeowners. Just: here’s your address, here’s our number, pay us.

The report itself is not credible

I spent $69. I wish I hadn’t — but I’m glad I saw what I’d have been promoting.

Tx Tax builds its case around an equal-and-uniform argument. Equal-and-uniform is a method of protesting, stating that your property should be valued similarly to comparable properties — homes that share your location, size, quality, and condition. The Dallas Morning News pitches it as “one of the most common and successful” types of protest, strongly implying that if you buy the report, you’ll win.

That’s misleading. For residential single-family homes, especially in Dallas County, equal-and-uniform is one of the hardest arguments to win. In my business, we usually have to file for arbitration or a lawsuit to succeed with it. The routes that actually produce reductions for homeowners are: photos showing the true condition of the property (front exterior view, kitchen, primary bathroom, living room, other bathrooms, etc.), repair estimates, and a sales-comparison analysis of recent transactions in the neighborhood. Those are our bread and butter. Equal-and-uniform almost never is.

Equal-and-uniform is also very technical. A credible argument requires pulling a reasonable sample of similar properties — typically seven — and calculating a median adjusted value. Two phrases in that sentence are crucial: “reasonable sample” and “adjusted value.” The Tx Tax report I bought gave me three comparable properties, with no adjustments applied to any of them. That isn’t a credible equal-and-uniform report. It’s not even a starting point in a protest, much less a finished report ready for the Appraisal Review Board (ARB).

The damage is predictable. A homeowner spends $69, takes a morning off work to attend their ARB hearing, hands over the Tx Tax report, and gets told by the appraiser and the panel that it’s missing adjustments and relies on too few comparables. The appraisal district will then pull up its own equal-and-uniform analysis — more thorough, properly adjusted — that conveniently supports the notice value. The homeowner walks out with no reduction, has wasted a bunch of time, and has lost $69 instead of saving money.

The ethical problems go further

Set the product quality aside for a moment. There are some bigger questions the Dallas Morning News (really Hearst because of the recent purchase) should have to answer.

First, how does a news organization credibly report on property tax issues in Texas when it owns a property tax product? Will its coverage be motivated to enhance this revenue stream, or protect it from scrutiny? Readers deserve to know.

Second, the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation is clear that you cannot charge a fee to prepare property tax reports or provide property tax services without a license — and if you are licensed, you must display that information on your website. I didn’t find any TDLR licensing disclosure on Tx Tax. (Note: Licensed Realtors are exempt from licensure for residential work, but I didn’t see Realtor credentials disclosed either.) If Tx Tax is operating without a license, that appears to be a licensing violation, not just an editorial one.

Beware of Homestead Exemption Scams and Property Tax Site Lookalikes

Third, and zooming out, this looks like a consumer protection issue worth the Attorney General’s attention. Is it predatory for a trusted news organization to tell homeowners they can save money with an equal-and-uniform protest, place a $69 buy button right beneath the pitch, and say nothing about the homestead caps and senior tax ceilings that would make those “savings” impossible for many of the people it’s selling to?

Why I’m not going to let this go

Some of you may remember when PropertyTax.io was itself a do-it-yourself product. I’m still proud of what we built. Ironically, the Dallas Morning News played a big role in that product gaining traction — they featured us, partly because we made design choices that actively told people not to buy our product if we didn’t think we could save them money. Honesty in the product was the whole point. I think it’s why they featured us in the first place.

My industry has changed a lot since then. Plenty of companies have built businesses on exactly the shortcuts I refused to take — dressing marketing up as “technology” and counting on homeowners not to know the difference. With Tx Tax, the Dallas Morning News has now placed itself squarely in that group.

I’ve been planning my next move in this space for a long time. The Dallas Morning News just made it urgent.

So I’ll leave you with this. The last time I built a product like this, the Dallas Morning News helped put it on the map. That was a different era — for them and for me. Something is coming. It’s free. It uses AI — the real kind, not a buzzword on a landing page — to look at your specific property and explain, in plain English, what the numbers actually mean and what to do about them. Everything Tx Tax charges $69 for, and more. All of it free.

Keep an eye out, or you can register now at the launch page and be notified when it is ready: OpenPropertyTax.com

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Glenn Goodrich is the founder of PropertyTax.io, a full-service property tax protest agency representing homeowners and commercial owners across North Texas.