When appraisal, ownership and residency records are connected, a homeowner tax benefit appears on properties held by companies and on concurrent homestead claims.
The records shown here “appear ineligible” or “warrant review.” This visualization does not allege fraud, and it suppresses every individual owner’s identity and address.
The workbook contains 548 property records, but 128 are marked N: the homestead an owner may lawfully retain. The estimated tax totals sum only the 420 records marked Y.
281 properties sit under entity-named owners—LLCs, builders, funds and related entities. 139 properties belong to individual cases whose names and addresses are suppressed here.
Each constellation groups properties carrying the same owner-of-record string. The largest visible clusters include Opendoor Property Trust I, Open House Texas Realty, Doors Holdings and Harkor Homes.
Entity-named records account for most of the current annual estimate, while anonymous individual overlaps account for most of the cumulative estimate because many have persisted longer.
A residence homestead is for the person who lives in the home. An LLC, an iBuyer, or a homebuilder cannot live anywhere — so the exemption is improper on its face. Each cluster below is one entity-named owner and the properties it holds.
The “entity-named” category is derived from owner strings containing identifiers such as LLC, LP, LTD, Inc., Corp., Trust, Realty, Holdings, Homes or similar terms.
Texas law allows one homestead per person. The longest-running case in this dataset carries a Harris County homestead going back to 1988 — and a Mississippi homestead going back to 1992. Estimated cumulative benefit: $368,000. Others double up in Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina. Individual names and addresses are not shown.
Orange marks are properties marked Y. Gray marks are the comparison homesteads retained to establish an overlap. Neither group exposes an individual’s name or street address.
Harris County used LexisNexis fraud-detection software to flag more than $21 million in erroneous homestead filings by 2018, and won a national award for the audit program in 2019. The Legislature ordered every appraisal district to run a periodic homestead review in 2023. The exemptions are still on the roll.
The 548 confirmed records come from a review that counts only what can be proven twice. It does not yet include the largest category: in-state movers who pick up a second homestead in another Texas county. Every figure was rebuilt from HCAD and Dallas CAD records, then checked against official out-of-state public records.
Start with appraisal-roll records carrying an active residence-homestead exemption.
Entity ownership, concurrent homesteads, outside mailing or another high-signal inconsistency.
A name match alone is insufficient; the match is tied to an address, parcel or another official identifier.
For individual overlaps, the comparison property is retained and marked N rather than counted as improper.
Annual benefit is summed; cumulative cost is estimated as current annual benefit multiplied by years held.
Only records independently re-derived and matched against a second identifier were included. Out-of-state duration counts only the verified overlap period. Asked directly, HCAD said it does not cross-reference exemption holders against out-of-state voter rolls and has no quantified estimate of the problem's scale.
“Appears ineligible” and “warrants review” describe a record mismatch. The visualization does not label any owner a fraudster.