Building a national property-tax engine with near-zero variable cost

Industry: PropTech

Mercury products: Treasury, Bill Pay, Invoicing, API, Accounting Integrations

Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Austin, Texas, Abode Money is the automated financial manager for homeowners across the United States. The company was built around a simple observation: the ongoing costs of homeownership, including property taxes and insurance, are opaque by design, and the burden falls on consumers least equipped to navigate them. After making “$10,000 worth of mistakes” on his own first home, Founder and CEO Tyler Bliha left Wall Street to address this “messy reality.”

Take property tax appeals, a hyper-localized and rigid system at best. Nearly every county across the US has its own distinct timelines, documentation standards, and evidence rules. Traditional firms in this space scale this work through reflexive hiring. By tying headcount to revenue, their margins quickly compress as volume grows.

Abode does things differently, combining agentic AI for data intensive functions with local, human expertise in customer-facing roles. In practice, this means they're able to offer property tax appeal solutions to 80 million (and counting) homeowners across all 50 states; automating the retrieval and normalization of millions of data points at zero marginal cost with “lean efficiency.” The team is keenly aware that automation in back-office functions allows for more room to build out the relationship management side of the house.

Bliha’s model of pairing feet on the street with agentic AI (circa 2023) mirrors the smart scaling blueprint proposed by Christine Lagarde and Larry Fink at the 2026 WEF in Davos. In a nutshell, Lagarde touched on hype versus real productivity; while Fink stressed the “human-centric implementation” of technology, where AI is used to amplify human potential and diffuse efficiency across the entire operation rather than simply replacing people. 

Being a few years ahead of the curve isn't by accident though. Bliha explains that “everything in this space runs on rigid rules and timelines, and if you don’t play within the existing framework (even if innovating) you’re fighting an uphill battle." The work is operationally intensive by nature, Abode's approach is thoughtful automation “where it makes sense.”

That automation extends to Abode’s finance stack, seen as part of the product architecture rather than a back-office function. This absorbs complexity through systems, leaving room for strategic hiring–crucial in a category where emotions run high and trust is fragile.

The result is a logic engine that manages three tightly coupled flows: 

• Capital management during predictable seasonal surges 
• Programmable payouts and collections tied directly to appeal outcomes, and 
• Real-time reconciliation that keeps unit economics visible without delay

During peak times, thousands of county assessments resolve at once and refunds, fees, and adjustments happen in parallel.  Here, custom automation in their finance stack does the heavy lifting. “Everything posts, tags, and rolls up automatically, so even during peak weeks the books stay audit-ready,” says Bliha, adding that they “don’t have to slow down decision-making to wait for finance to catch up.”

To absorb that volume, Mercury’s Quickbooks integration automatically tags transactions as they post, preventing manual entry or reconciliation backlogs. The books stay audit-ready in real time, and the team can calculate payback immediately instead of waiting for a month-end close.

Contingency fees are handled the same way. When an appeal resolves, Abode triggers payouts programmatically through the Mercury API, with amounts tied directly to the county’s final reduction. This removes the risk of mismatches between bills and outcomes–errors that could erode customer trust–and eliminates manual payout work during high-volume cycles where automation can absorb complexity.

Finally, excess operating cash is managed through automated Treasury sweep rules. Predictable surpluses shift into securities while remaining accessible for ad hoc payments. Yield accrues without introducing new workflows, allowing the balance itself to contribute to revenue while the team stays focused on the product and underlying system.

By automating their “entire finance layer,” with instant updates, programmable tasks and clean APIs, Bliha's team can “move money with no manual ops” and focus on expanding into new verticals while: 

• Maintaining 95%+ gross margins, nearly triple the industry standard for tax appeal firms
• Supporting 80M+ homeowners across 50 states through automated workflows
• Ensuring day-0 payback, with acquisition costs recovered the day they're spent

Abode is transforming the residential market into a managed asset class by automating the carry costs homeowners often don’t see coming. As the company expands its operating model into insurance and utilities, the team's core objective remains the same, scale without friction.