The highest rate is at the top. The overcharge is in the middle.

Start at the bottom of the market. Among the least expensive homes we can confidently value — under roughly $150,000 — only about 2.4% come in over-assessed, the lowest rate of any price band in the county. As a group these homes make up barely 0.4% of every over-assessed home in Fulton. Whatever the overcharge problem is in this county, it doesn't ride at the bottom.

That isn't the last word on fairness — price is only one way to slice a county, and there are others worth looking at. But on price alone, the story runs opposite to the hunch.

Move up the market and the over-assessment rate rises with it. It's highest at the very top: among homes above $2 million that we can value, about 33.8% are over-assessed — the highest rate of any price band we measure. The priciest homes, not the cheapest, carry the highest over-assessment rate.

But a rate is only half a fact. That top band is a sliver of the county: homes above $2 million make up only about 4.9% of every over-assessed home in Fulton. A high rate on a small population. If you stopped at the rate, you'd walk away with the wrong picture of where the problem actually sits.

Here's the part that keeps me honest about that 33.8%. Luxury homes trade rarely, and each one is close to unique. Even when we can put a value on a home above $2 million, we're usually doing it from a handful of sales that sit further away — in size, in price, in time — than we'd like, because the comparable sales that bracket a home cleanly, one larger and one smaller the way our method wants, grow scarce at the top. So an over-assessment finding up there rests on thinner evidence than the same finding does in the heart of the market, where similar sales are dense. And when the evidence won't hold at all, we set the home aside rather than report a guess.

So the top-band number isn't “a third of the mansions are overcharged, case closed.” It's two things at once: at the top, the gap between the county's value and the market looks widest, and it's also where that estimate — ours included — stands on the shakiest ground. Both are true. The honest version says both, which is why the very homes with the highest measured rate are the ones we're most cautious about claiming. The full discipline for what we'll value and what we hold back is at jasminelane.app/methodology.

Now the useful part. The real concentration of over-assessment isn't at either edge — it's in the middle, in the $250,000-to-$500,000 range where most Fulton homeowners actually live. Homes in that stretch account for about 46% of every over-assessed home in the county — nearly half the problem, in one band of the market. The $300,000–$400,000 range alone accounts for about 21.6% of every over-assessed home, at a rate of roughly 25.3% — a high rate and a high count in the same breath.

And unlike the top, the evidence here is strong. These neighborhoods have dense, recent sales of genuinely similar homes, so the comps bracket cleanly and the confidence is high — though that confidence is about our ability to prove an overcharge, not a sign the county is more wrong here than anywhere else. The rate itself keeps climbing with price; what makes the middle dominate is simply that this is where most Fulton homes are, so a middling rate lands on far more houses than a higher rate does at the sparse top. That combination is the whole point: the overcharges in the middle of the market are both common and provable. They're the ones an appeal can actually correct.

Across the roll, of the roughly 190,000 Fulton homes we can confidently value, about 31,000 — 16.4% — are over-assessed (11.9% of every home we examine). We estimate that's on the order of $49 million a year the county's own values are placing on homes above what recent sales support, with a median of $804 a year for the typical over-assessed home.¹ Not a fortune on any one house. Real money, every year, on an ordinary house.

Put the three cuts together and the shape is clear. The highest rate is at the top of the market. The thinnest evidence is at the top of the market. And most of the volume is in the middle. Which is the honest reason we never lead with a home's price tag to decide whether it's overpaying — a number that's high because a market is expensive, and a number that's high because the evidence is thin, can look identical from a distance. So we check each home against its own neighbors, one at a time, and only speak up when the sales actually prove it.

Price is one lens on who's overpaying in Fulton. Where you live is another — and it cuts sharper still: neighborhood by neighborhood, the over-assessment rate runs from zero to 93%.