Original Research · 8,058 Colorado BAA Cases · Tax Year 2023
What a 95% Win Rate Actually Tells You
Consultants advertise win rates north of 90%. Colorado's own appeal docket says the market settles 61% — and the two biggest advocates in the state run below that. The difference isn't skill. It's how much winnable money never gets filed.
By Charlie Young, Principal — former Managing Director at one of the nation's largest property tax firms · LinkedIn · July 2026
Nearly every property tax consultant's website carries a win rate, and the numbers run high — 90%, 95%, sometimes better. After thirteen years inside this industry, I read those numbers differently than they're intended: a win rate doesn't measure how good a consultant is in the hearing room. It measures how tight their intake filter is.
The reason is contingency economics. A consultant paid only on wins has a quiet incentive to file the sure things and decline the arguable ones — every declined close call raises the win rate and the fee earned per hour worked. The problem is that your money lives in the arguable ones. An owner doesn't bank a percentage; an owner banks dollars, and the marginal filings are where the unclaimed dollars sit.
That's a claim you can test, because Colorado publishes the outcome of every appeal that reaches the state Board of Assessment Appeals. So we pulled all of them.
Methodology: SVA analysis of Colorado Board of Assessment Appeals docket records — every commercial case for tax year 2023 on the docket as of mid-2026 (n = 8,058). The BAA is the state-level appeal after the assessor and county board stages. "Settled" means an order entered on stipulation — the county agreed to a reduction. Firms are intentionally not named; the docket is public record.
The market's true number is 61%
Across every represented and self-represented owner in the state, 60.7% of commercial BAA appeals ended in a negotiated reduction. That's the honest, everyone-included win rate for the venue — the whole market, not anyone's marketing department.
Notice something else first: almost nothing gets tried. Fifty-five cases in 8,058 — 0.7% — reached a merits decision. The Colorado BAA is, functionally, a negotiation forum with a courtroom attached. The credible threat of a hearing is what moves counties; the hearing itself almost never happens.
Volume and win rate pull against each other
Now cut the same data by who filed. The three largest filers account for 65% of every commercial case in the state — and the two biggest books settled 49% and 57% of their filings. Meanwhile, the prettiest win rates in the entire dataset belong to the smallest books: three firms filing 20–120 cases settled 90–100% of them.
Be careful with the inference — a high settlement rate is not proof that any individual firm cherry-picks, and skill, property mix, and county mix all matter. But the pattern is exactly what filter economics predicts, and one part of it is hard to argue with: at meaningful volume, a 95–100% win rate is statistically implausible unless the intake filter is doing most of the work. The firms doing the most fighting on behalf of Colorado owners — thousands of cases a year — live at 49–57%. The market as a whole lives at 61%.
A win rate measures the intake filter, not the hearing room.
Why the lower number makes owners more money
Run the portfolio math. Say twenty buildings, and an honest read says seven are slam dunks, eight are arguable, and five are correctly assessed. The selective consultant files the seven, wins nearly all of them, and advertises 95%. The aggressive consultant files fifteen and — at the market's own 60% — wins nine. Two more buildings reduced, and on a pure contingency fee, the losing filings cost the owner nothing. The 95% consultant looks better in marketing. The 60% consultant put more dollars in the client's account.
Aggressive doesn't mean reckless. The one-in-a-thousand raise risk in the table above is real but screenable, and there are jurisdictions and situations where filing carries genuine downside — Colorado's own CBOE stage compels income and expense disclosure, and in cap states a paper reduction can fail to reach the bill at all. Knowing which arguable cases to file is the actual expertise; declining them wholesale to protect a statistic is not.
What to ask instead of "what's your win rate?"
- What share of my portfolio would you file, and why? The answer reveals the intake filter directly.
- What's your average reduction on the cases you win? Depth of wins matters more than frequency.
- What would you decline to file, and what's the reasoning? The good answer cites downside screens, not odds of losing.
- Total dollars recovered per dollar of value under management? The only number that actually pays your bills.
When we're advocating properly, we expect to win roughly six appeals in ten — the rate Colorado's own docket produces when everything worth fighting gets filed. If a consultant is winning nine and a half out of ten, the question worth asking isn't how they win so often. It's what they didn't file.