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Discover how a missed deadline turned into an opportunity for Sateesh and Vamshi to found Bezit, a service helping homeowners navigate property tax protests. Learn how Bezit's mission goes beyond tax savings to make homeownership a joyful experience for all.
How a missed deadline led to an opportunity to resolve property tax protest
On any given day, Sateesh is a quintessential family man with dad duties. He is also a techie-turned-entrepreneur who runs a handful of startups. However, between raising a family and running a business, ignoring the piled-up paperwork on his property led him to pay more taxes than he should have.
That’s when he decided to take matters into hand, which led to founding Bezit with his teammate, Vamshi.
What is Bezit?
Bezit is a Dutch word that means ‘possess’. Possessing things is in our DNA. There is plenty of evidence that humans love to possess things – anything from a piece of land to a pre-loved jacket.
Homeownership is part of the American Dream. Owning a home is one of the things that makes a person feel complete. The desire for stability is ingrained in every living creature, and more so in humans, along with the desire for one’s possessions and loved ones to be protected.
Now, imagine having a beautiful home, but paying more than your fair share in just property taxes. Infuriating, right? Well, Sateesh decided to channel that emotion and built a service that helps people worry less about property taxes.
The Bezit Mission
Buying a home is one of the most important and emotionally intense experiences a person can have. It affects every aspect of life, as having a place to call one’s own is deeply satisfying and supportive. Having faced issues with asserting his right to protest like missing the due date, finding the right agent, acquiring the sales data and trends in property rates, Sateesh figured there was an opportunity to help homeowners with the process.
Today, the vision isn’t limited to tax savings. Bezit is on a mission to make home ownership the joyful and fulfilling experience people deserve to have. Tax savings are an important part of what we offer, but that’s just the beginning.
The inspiration to solve something as complicated as property taxes
Team Bezit believes every homeowner should be a proud homeowner and assert their right to property tax protest if it has been valued incorrectly. In Sateesh's words, there are only two ways to solve the property tax problem (at least partly):
1. Rely on the agents for property tax protest.
There is lot of inertia from both agents and homeowners to initiate the appeal. Homeowners are more resistant to pursue agents because they have to share 40% of the savings on their tax returns with the agent.
In most cases, neither the homeowner nor the agent know what the tentative savings could be. Therefore, both parties are not motivated enough to protest their taxes.
Take new homeowners for example.
They are always told by someone to apply for homestead exemption but no one tells them what to do. It's hard for a new homeowner to grapple with the homestead exemption procedure.
Paperwork is cumbersome and with little-to-no knowledge of what to do, there is a lot of inertia to print the documents and mail the documents to the county. With tech, we tried to solve this problem.
When a homeowner adds his home address on our the Bezit portal, it instantly shows estimated savings. This crucial data helps a homeowner to make a decision whether to protest or not.
2. DIY - Do all the work themselves.
A homeowner finds an agent and asks for recent sales data in their neighborhood. If the agent is helpful and professional, he will set a radius and pull all the sales data in the email for the homeowner.
The homeowner then has to do the hard work of compiling the data of all homes that are similar to theirs from the huge list. Then comes the most important task - calculating the value and proving its accuracy. This requires a lot of patience, effort and time. And remember, all of this must be done before the due date.
We worked on simplifying this with technology. Homeowners can apply online and resume whenever they want to. With our novel services, we have managed to address all these concerns, thus saving you time, effort, and money.
Bezit was born from a personal need to simplify and optimize property tax management. Its growth and development have been driven by a combination of technical expertise, a proprietary algorithm, a deep understanding of property taxes, and a strong focus on user experience.