Most residential protests in Douglas County argue overvaluation: the assessor said the house is worth $X, recent sales of comparable homes say it’s worth less. A second, less-used argument lives in Neb. Rev. Stat. § 77-1502 and the cases interpreting it: unequal appraisal. This is the argument that even if the assessor’s opinion of value is defensible in isolation, it treats your property worse than similar properties nearby.
What the statute actually says
Section 77-1502 is the protest statute. It directs the Board of Equalization to hear protests and to adjust assessed values to achieve uniformity. Read alongside § 77-201 (the constitutional uniformity requirement) and § 77-1374 (assessment ratio standards), it gives an owner two independent paths to a reduction: a property is overvalued in absolute terms, or it is fairly valued but inequitably so relative to comparable properties.
The Nebraska Department of Revenue’s assessment standards target a residential sales-assessment ratio between 92 percent and 100 percent. When the ratio in your neighborhood drifts above your own ratio, an unequal-appraisal claim has structural support.
When the argument is the right one
Unequal appraisal is the right argument in three patterns:
- Your subject property recently sold and the assessor set the new value at or near the sale price, while neighbors that haven’t turned over in years remain assessed at a fraction of current market value. The sale price is defensible; the inequality is the problem.
- A new addition or renovation triggered a reassessment well above the area’s sales-assessment ratio. Improvements get full-market treatment while comps next door do not.
- A reassessment cycle missed a neighborhood. Properties two streets over received fresh values; yours did not, or did, and the differences look arbitrary.
Proving inequality
An unequal-appraisal case is built from the same data as an overvaluation case, but used differently. Instead of arguing what your property is worth, you argue what comparable properties are assessed at relative to what they sold for.
- Identify five to ten comparable properties — same age band, size band, neighborhood — that sold in the prior twelve months.
- For each, pull the assessed value as of the protest year and the sale price. The ratio is assessed value divided by sale price.
- Compute the median ratio for the comp set. This is your neighborhood sales-assessment ratio.
- Compute the same ratio for your own property using either its recent sale price or a defensible market-value estimate.
- If your ratio materially exceeds the neighborhood ratio, ask the BOE to reduce your assessed value to bring it in line.
A worked example
Suppose ten nearby comps have a median sales-assessment ratio of 94 percent — that is, the assessor values them at 94 cents per dollar of market value. Your property is assessed at $400,000 and a defensible market-value estimate is $390,000, putting your ratio at 103 percent. The requested value is the one that brings your ratio to the neighborhood median: $390,000 × 0.94 = $366,600. That is the number that goes in your Form 422.
Pitfalls
- Mixing comp pools.Don’t use one set of comps to argue overvaluation and a different set for inequality. Use one comp set, present both views.
- Bad comps. Foreclosure sales, family transfers, and deeply discounted estate sales pull the median down artificially. The BOE will exclude them and so should you.
- Sale-chasing claims. If you bought recently, the assessor may already be using your sale price as the value. That is legal under Nebraska practice. Argue inequality against comps that have not turned over, not against the use of your own sale price.
When to skip this argument
If your overvaluation case is strong on its own — three to five clean comps below your assessed value — you don’t need the inequality argument. Leading with one clean theory beats a packet that hedges between two. Save unequal appraisal for the cases where the assessor’s opinion of value is hard to dispute but the pattern of assessment is.