The JustValue Review and Case-Building Standard

Every JustValue conclusion should be checkable. This page explains what we review, the evidence we accept, how we reach a conclusion, and the reasons we decline to build a case. It is the standard that decides what we produce for you; what we refund is set out in our Terms.

What we review

JustValue analyzes public records: the county tax roll, property characteristics maintained by the county Property Appraiser, and recorded sales. We review every eligible single-family home and condominium in a covered county — not a sample. We use no private data, and nothing about a property's owner beyond what the public record contains.

The evidence we accept

An assessment review is only as strong as the sales behind it. Our standard for a comparable sale:

• Qualified, arm's-length, single-parcel sales only, as classified by the state's own sale-qualification codes. Multi-parcel and allocated sales are excluded — a price covering two properties is not evidence of one property's value.
• Sales from the year preceding the assessment date. Florida assesses value as of January 1. Our primary evidence window is the calendar year preceding the January 1 assessment date. When qualified sales are limited, we may examine earlier transactions for additional context. Sales occurring after January 1 are not used to set the value indication.
• Genuinely similar properties. Comparables must match the subject's property-use class and be evaluated on the characteristics the county itself records: location (nearest first — same subdivision or neighborhood before wider areas), living area as the roll records it, and age. Condominium units are compared against sales in their own complex.

How we reach a value conclusion

We compare price per square foot of living area — the total living area the county roll records, the same measure on both sides — across the most similar qualified sales — typically five to eight — weighted by similarity, and take the middle of that evidence, not its edges. We never build a case on the lowest sale we can find. A conclusion supported by the center of the evidence is one that holds up; an outlier is an argument waiting to lose.

Price per square foot is a comparison tool, not a conclusion by itself. Two properties can share a price per square foot and be nothing alike, so the figure earns weight only after the pair has cleared the screens that make the comparison mean something. Every sale that informs a conclusion has passed all of these:

• Use class, and never across it. Only the classes we cover, and a single-family sale is never compared against a condominium or the reverse.
• Qualified arm's-length sales, as the state's own codes classify them, above a minimum price that excludes token and coded transfers.
• Market area, nearest first — the county's own neighborhood coding before wider areas. Condominium sales never expand past the subject's own complex.
• Living area, as a hard band. A sale outside ±20% of the subject's recorded living area is not used, however similar it looks otherwise.
• Effective age, as a hard band. Sales diverging more than fifteen years in effective age are not used, in either direction.
• A price-per-square-foot sanity band, applied where the pool is deep enough to define one. Thinner pools get no such exclusion and are labelled thin, rather than filtered against a distribution too small to have one.
• Required characteristics on both sides. The subject and every sale used must carry the fields the comparison depends on: use code, recorded living area, actual and effective year built, land value, and location.

Where land value dominates a property's just value, we decline to produce a value indication at all rather than compute one and set it aside. An improvement-based comparison does not describe such a parcel, and a number that should not be relied on is safer never created than created and withdrawn. Where required characteristics cannot be evaluated from the public record, the sale is not used.

We publish the comparable-sale PPSF range alongside the indicated value: the 25th to the 75th percentile of the price per square foot of the sales we used, applied to the property's living area. That span is the evidence describing its own strength — a tightly grouped pool spans little, a scattered one spans more — and it is the same pool the conclusion rests on, not a wider set chosen to look reassuring.

This range is descriptive — not a statistical confidence interval or an appraisal range. It shows the middle half of the selected comparable-sale evidence. It is named for what it measures because it is not built the way the conclusion is: the indicated value is weighted by similarity, and these quartiles are not. Two different treatments of one pool must not be presented as one method.

Below five sales we do not publish a span. An interquartile range over four numbers implies a distribution the pool cannot support. We list the sales individually instead, and the conclusion says how many cleared our filters, so a thin pool is visible in the sentence that draws on it rather than only in a table above it.

Every review receives an evidence-strength rating based on how many qualified comparables exist, how similar they are, and how tightly they agree. Weak evidence is labeled as weak. When the evidence does not support review, the result says so — a fair assessment is a valid result, and we say it plainly.

The completeness rule

We do not produce a valuation from an incomplete record. If required characteristics are missing for a property — or for the sales it would be compared against — the result is “needs additional review,” not a guess. We would rather tell you we're not ready than sell you a case we can't stand behind.

Exemption and portability findings

Homestead and portability findings describe the public record, not eligibility. “No homestead on record” means exactly that; whether an owner qualifies is attested by the owner and decided by the county. Estimated exemption savings account for differences among taxing authorities, including the fact that the additional homestead exemption does not apply to school-district taxes. They are computed from each county's verified millage — a detail often overstated elsewhere. Where a county's millage components are not yet verified, we show no figure rather than an approximate one.

Reasons we decline to build a case

This standard decides what we produce, not what you are charged. Where it is not met we say so and tell you why, and no appeal is prepared — we would rather tell you the evidence is thin than file something we would not stand behind. You still receive the finding, the comparable sales with their weaknesses stated plainly, and your county's own petition path, which is yours to use with or without us.

The conditions under which no case is built:

• Too few qualified comparable sales after all window and area extensions
• Required property or comparable characteristics missing from the record
• Assessment-cap circumstances that make the apparent difference unactionable
• Updated county values that no longer support the original finding

Refund eligibility is governed by the applicable plan terms and the refund terms, both set out in our Terms & Disclosures.

What our review is not

A JustValue review is an automated analysis of public records. Before any case document is produced, automated gates verify that the property resolves to a single record carrying an owner and a situs address; that the finding and the document are built from the same roll edition, so nobody receives a document describing a different year than the finding that reached them; that every county form matches the revision we hold, by hash; that no field we may not collect is reachable; and that the rendered wording passes the same language checks this page is held to. Each of these stops the build rather than degrading it — a case is produced or it is refused, and a refusal refunds automatically rather than waiting on anyone's availability.

The case is reviewed by the owner, not by us. What we produce, you read, sign and file: the checklist and signature guidance come with it, your signature goes on the county's own form — never on anything of ours — and the filing is yours. We do not file on anyone's behalf.

A review is not a licensed real estate appraisal, legal advice, or a prediction of any county decision. The AI-REVIEWED mark on an analysis means it passed our quality-control standard — it is not a certification or a guarantee of outcome. Property owners may appeal assessments and apply for exemptions directly with the county at no charge, without purchasing anything from JustValue.

How this relates to an appeal

A lower automated value indication does not by itself establish that an assessment should be reduced. In a Florida value challenge, the party initiating the challenge generally carries the burden of proving by a preponderance of the evidence that the assessed value is incorrect (§ 194.301(2)(a)). The property appraiser's assessment is presumed correct where the appraiser proves, also by a preponderance of the evidence, that it was arrived at by complying with § 193.011 — the statutory factors to consider in deriving just valuation — and with professionally accepted appraisal practices (§ 194.301(1)). We do not represent that our numerical conclusion alone satisfies that standard, or that it requires the county or a value adjustment board to change an assessment.

What our findings are built from

The county record is our source; you are the one who knows if it’s right.

Every finding here comes from public records — county property appraiser tax rolls and filings published by the Florida Department of Revenue. We do not inspect properties, and we hold nothing about you that the public record does not already contain.

Those records can be wrong, and they change. A county’s preliminary roll is revised before it is certified, so a value we read in July may not be the value that stands in October. Records also carry ordinary errors — a square footage that was never updated, an owner address in the wrong field. We read what the county published; we cannot know whether it describes your property correctly. You can.

So we show the source. Every figure in a report names the roll edition it came from and the record it was read from, and the report tells you where to check it against the county’s own page. A finding you cannot verify is one you should not act on.

When our findings change

Our findings change when the data improves. A better reading of a county’s records can move a number substantially without anything about anyone’s property having changed. We maintain a dated correction log for material changes to our data processing, methodology, and published aggregate figures: Methodology Changes and Corrections. Each entry states how far the correction reached.

What we do about it. Each year, when your county publishes its new roll, we re-run your review against it and send you the result. That report is built from the new edition and states which edition it used, so you can see what moved and what did not. Where we have revised a published figure, we say so on the page that carries it and date the revision.

We are describing the annual re-check, which is the product. We do not currently send a separate notice the moment an individual finding changes between editions — if we build that, this page will say so.

Review and Case-Building Standard, version 1 · Published July 2026 · Material changes to this standard are dated here.