AutoLandmark: Autonomous Historic Property Tax Exemption Bureau

How the agent runs it

The agent team continuously scrapes county assessor databases and historic register APIs to identify properties that qualify for state or federal historic preservation tax exemptions but have never filed. Qualifying owners are auto-prospected, enrolled via a self-serve intake flow, and then a specialist agent pipeline researches the property's historic eligibility, assembles the required documentation package, and submits the application to the relevant state historic preservation office (SHPO) or county assessor on the owner's behalf. The business earns a contingency fee on the first year's tax savings delivered, with no upfront cost to the property owner, creating a frictionless sales motion the intake agent handles autonomously.

Who this is for

The ideal owner has a background in real estate law, property tax consulting, or municipal government and understands how SHPO and assessor workflows operate. They do not need to be technical — the agent infrastructure is pre-built — but they must be willing to serve as the licensed signatory on filings in states that require a registered tax agent or attorney. This suits a former property tax consultant or historic preservation officer who wants to convert their domain expertise into a scalable, largely passive business without hiring staff.

Market opportunity

There are an estimated 1.9 million contributing properties on or eligible for the National Register of Historic Places in the US, yet fewer than 15% of privately owned eligible properties have ever filed for available state or local tax exemptions, representing a massive unclaimed savings pool. The 2023 Inflation Reduction Act expanded federal historic tax credit access for smaller pass-through owners, creating a new wave of eligibility that most property owners are completely unaware of. County assessor data is increasingly available via open data portals, making programmatic prospecting viable at a scale that was impossible five years ago.

Boss agent: APEX (Autonomous Pipeline Execution Coordinator)

APEX monitors every active case's stage in Airtable, triggers the correct specialist agent at each pipeline transition, enforces SLA timers, escalates stalled cases to human review, and ensures no filing is submitted without a completed eligibility score above the 78% confidence threshold.

• ■ No outreach email is sent to a property owner unless the eligibility confidence score from the Research Agent exceeds 78%
• ■ No SHPO application is submitted without a completed DocuSign fee agreement on file for that property
• ■ Any case idle for more than 5 business days without a SHPO acknowledgment is automatically escalated to the human owner's dashboard with a recommended action

The agent team

Human touchpoints

// the only things that still need you

• 👤 Signing and notarizing state-specific power-of-attorney or authorized representative forms required by SHPOs in states that do not accept agent-executed submissions
• 👤 Reviewing and approving any SHPO response that constitutes a formal denial or requests a public hearing, as these carry legal and reputational consequences requiring human judgment
• 👤 Authorizing ACH payouts above $10,000 in a single transaction through the business bank account as required by the payment processor's fraud controls
• 👤 Annual review and approval of the fee agreement template whenever state tax regulations change in a served jurisdiction, requiring a licensed professional's sign-off

Tech stack

Monetization

The business charges a contingency fee of 30–40% of the first year's verified tax savings, with a minimum fee floor of $800 per successful filing. A retainer tier ($299/mo) is offered to portfolio landlords and real estate attorneys who want ongoing exemption monitoring across multiple properties.

Key risks

• → State SHPO offices vary widely in their digital submission readiness — some still require wet-ink signatures or physical mail, creating bottlenecks the document agent must route to human handling on a per-state basis.
• → Contingency fee structures for tax reduction services face regulatory scrutiny in several states (notably California and Texas), requiring ongoing legal monitoring to ensure the fee model remains compliant in each jurisdiction served.

Getting started

1. 1
   Identify three pilot states with digital SHPO portals

   Select states like New York, Colorado, and Virginia where SHPO applications can be submitted electronically and assessor data is accessible via open portals. Limiting initial scope controls agent complexity and lets you validate the filing pipeline before scaling.
2. 2
   Build the county assessor scraping layer first

   Use Playwright to extract property age, use classification, and owner contact data from the three pilot states' assessor sites. This is the top-of-funnel data that feeds every downstream agent, so accuracy here is critical — budget two weeks for validation.
3. 3
   Train the eligibility research agent on SHPO criteria

   Feed Claude the National Register nomination criteria, each pilot state's SHPO eligibility checklist, and 20–30 sample approved nominations as few-shot examples. The agent must reliably score a property's eligibility before any outreach is triggered to avoid wasted prospect contacts.
4. 4
   Configure DocuSign and Stripe for zero-touch enrollment

   Set up a Typeform intake that captures owner consent and fee agreement, routed through DocuSign for e-signature and Stripe Connect for ACH payment authorization on contingency delivery. This is the only revenue-critical flow and must be tested end-to-end before launch.
5. 5
   Soft-launch with five manually sourced pilot cases

   Identify five real qualifying properties through your own network or a historic preservation nonprofit partner and run them through the full agent pipeline while monitoring each step. Real cases reveal edge cases in document assembly and SHPO communication that synthetic tests will miss.

// done for you

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