ProperTax™ Process
The RealAdvice ProperTax™ Process is our proprietary four-phase methodology for ensuring that our clients pay only the legally correct amount of property taxes and transfer taxes from the purchase or sale of a revenue-producing property, and no more. The ProperTax Process encompasses all stages of the property transaction process, from pre-sale through reassessment, to ensure that only the legally accurate and correct values are identified, reported, and taxed. RealAdvice experts work with all participants in the transaction to ensure the correct outcome, and apply proven, proprietary resources at every critical reporting and administrative step. The ProperTax Process simplifies the administrative and reporting process, and provides a competitive and financial edge to our clients.
The PairedExpert™ approach is RealAdvice’s groundbreaking methodology that combines the financial expertise of both the real estate appraisal and business valuation professions to produce an integrated statement of a commercial property’s accurately allocated market value. This approach can be applied to any asset class, and is the first and only cross-disciplinary method for generating a reconciled and unified analysis and allocation of value in accordance with state and federal laws.
Each RealAdvice appraisal is signed by two MAI designated appraisers and two CPA/ABV accredited business valuation specialists, with the expert appraisers attesting to the real property value and the expert accountants attesting to the business value. The result is an irrefutable combined valuation that has been developed to a higher standard of financial accuracy and defensibility than any other appraisal in the industry. Over twenty years of development and testing went into creating this methodology which seamlessly bridges these two professionally accepted approaches in a way that is compliant with the Daubert standard1 as well as all applicable professional, federal, and state regulations. RealAdvice services leverage the combination of these two disciplines, exceeding the highest standards of excellence from both professions.
Client Concierge
Each RealAdvice client is assigned a Client Concierge, an expert specialized in guiding all parties correctly through the entire data collection, appraisal, settlement, reporting, and reassessment process.
WarpCore™ Platform
WarpCore™ is RealAdvice’s advanced software platform for supporting all parts of the valuation, transaction, and reporting process. It enables our PairedExpert appraisers and accountants to achieve maximum accuracy and consistency through adaptive learning algorithms, and systematizes more than 15 years of proprietary process development into a single cloud-based expert system platform. With every new appraisal, WarpCore becomes more precise. WarpCore is the most leading-edge technology in the CRE valuation industry; while every other tax advisory firm is building software to replicate how appraisals have been generated for the last 100 years, WarpCore pioneers a fundamentally new way of thinking about commercial property valuation and bringing value to clients.
Our approach recognizes the statutory mandate of most states that intangible assets are not taxable for transfer tax or property tax purposes. Recently, court proceedings have agreed.2 A significant portion of a commercial property’s transaction value may stem from nontaxable elements such as, but not limited to, intellectual property (brands, know-how, tradename, technology) tenant relationships, contracts in place, assembled workforce, licenses, unamortized tenant improvements, leasing commissions, and more.
Every RealAdvice appraisal allocates a subject property’s components of value across eighteen or more categories, each mathematically weighted by relative risk and discounted future value. Our Authoritative Allocation™ method produces an appeal- and litigation-ready document detailing every supporting component of value. It is “authoritative” because each of its individual components and key claims are supported by irrefutable sources. The AAM complies with all current best practices, and with the Codes of Professional Ethics of both the Appraisal Institute and the American Institute of CPAs in applying the Cost, Market, and Income approaches to value assets, liabilities, and associated rates of return.
Our ProperTax™ Appraisal report is a comprehensive appraisal document that provides a detailed analysis of all components of a commercial asset’s fair market value, including elements typically overlooked by conformist valuation methodologies. Each ProperTax Appraisal combines the analytical power of the PairedExpert approach with the specificity and documented detail of the Authoritative Allocation Method to provide an incontrovertible statement of value. Every RealAdvice client receives a ProperTax Appraisal that is the new industry benchmark for precision, detail, and legal defensibility, and which documents the appropriately taxable value of the subject property under state and federal law.
The ProperTax Estimate is a two-page summary of economic benefits generated prior to closing for a particular transaction. Each ProperTax Estimate contains a 5-year projection of estimated property tax savings, an estimate of transfer tax savings, an estimate of asset value enhancement and increased NOI, as well as ROI calculations, and estimated operating cost reductions (per square footage and per door). The Estimates are valuable in helping RealAdvice clients bid more competitively, helping buyers and sellers find agreement at a mutually profitable purchase price, and for quantifying crucial expense savings that would otherwise make potential transactions infeasible.
ProperTax™ Checklist
Based on experience from hundreds of successful transactions, RealAdvice has developed a proprietary checklist of reporting and administrative actions that ensure a successful filing. The RealAdvice Client Concierge applies the ProperTax Checklist to every engagement to prevent errors, guide success, and to help clients make certain that no party to the transaction reports incorrect values. The ProperTax Checklist protects the client from under-reporting or over-reporting property values, both of which are illegal under tax laws.
ProperTax™ Warranty
RealAdvice promises that aside from a modest charge for the actual appraisal (required by professional standards), our clients never pay a fee unless they realize a benefit from our services. There is no financial risk or net cost for leveraging RealAdvice in your next transaction.
Certified To The Highest Levels of Security
RealAdvice systems have been certified to System and Organization Controls (SOC) 1 Type II (financial processes and security) and SOC 2 Type II (technology, vendors, and cybersecurity), demonstrating that we have been proven to maintain the highest standards of care, privacy, and security for our clients’ information.
Successful Innovation Takes Time
Our founder had the idea for integrating business intangibles allocations into his appraisals almost twenty years ago, but it took most of that intervening time to develop his concept into a new standard of accuracy which can – and repeatedly has – withstood “trial by fire” in over 1,200 real-world transactions.
The first ten years were invested in working with some of the top professionals in business valuation to conceptually map out how to systematically bridge the two professions, and ten more years were applied in actual client transactions to test and refine the methodology, to perfect the theory and math, and to incorporate every possible assurance for our clients.
RealAdvice’s innovations bring an unprecedented sophistication to client appraisals, with an absolute focus on accuracy and client protection.
Why Should This Be Complicated?
It seems obvious – the appraiser values the real property value, the accountant values the business intangibles, and together they add up to the market value. So why is this process so difficult? Anyone should be able to do this, right?
These two professions often use similar terminology and jargon, but this superficial similarity is misleading. Many of the shared terms are defined and interpreted in very different, and sometimes mutually conflicting, ways
Most importantly, appraisers and accountants approach valuation from opposite directions and with opposite assumptions; expecting them to “meet in the middle” with no underlying theoretical and mathematical framework is like two gunslingers trying to shoot each other’s bullets out of the air. Without a framework to guide precision, the two approaches never converge, and an unexplainable gap or overlap appears that exposes both the real property appraisal and the business intangibles valuation to rebuttal. Indeed, many of our Founder’s early experiments working to integrate accounting valuations resulted in irreconcilably different interpretations of market value, or with combined valuations that had little relation to a freely negotiated purchase price. It took dedicated work with some of the best minds in both professions to build a “Rosetta Stone” that methodologically bridged the two different approaches to determining a supportable, defensible value conclusion. Like Olympic athletes, RealAdvice professionals make it seem simple for our clients, but like the “tip of the iceberg,” there is a vast amount of complexity and sophistication being harnessed to produce each and every RealAdvice appraisal.
A good innovation always seems obvious and simple, after the fact. We are confident that our innovations will have such an impact that within ten years, the PairedExpert Approach and Authoritative Allocation Methods will not only be best practice, but they will be standard practice across the entire appraisal industry and a part of all university appraisal curricula. Existing tax services providers will be pressured to rush a comparable service to market, but without having the time for testing and development undertaken by RealAdvice, they risk years of client service failures resulting from inferior, incomplete, and inadequate methodologies. Perfection takes time!
