Attorney Nicole Hauptman Amick has helped thousands of property owners lower their property taxes in Allegheny County. She has specialized in Allegheny County property assessment appeals since 2010. One of the main areas of practice of our firm is real estate. Now that's a really general topic. A lot of what we do is real estate assessment appeals. That impacts everybody because everybody that owns a property pays property taxes, so that is a pretty universal thing. So typically when someone buys a property, the school district or that municipality has the opportunity to challenge their assessment value. Now, pretty much anybody that buys a property for more than what it is assessed for will be appealed. So you will get something in the mail that the school district or the municipality is challenging your assessment. What you need to do, or what we would do for you, would be to go into a hearing and basically tell the hearing officer at the Board of property assessments why we think that an increase in your assessment value is unjustified. There is a few different things that property owners need to know about that. First of all, often times in a property sale there is other things included in the purchase price - sometimes the seller will include various things as a discount in the purchase price. That is important to convey to the hearing officer because that really impacts what the actual purchase price was. Additionally, unfortunately property owners often find issues with the property that they were not aware of when they bought it. So when those things come up you need to tell someone about that because that would certainly impact the fair market value of the property.