How to Find Comps for a Property Tax Appeal (and What Actually Counts as Comparable)
A comp is a property enough like yours that a stranger would price the two the same way. For a tax appeal you generally want at least four of them, they come from your county's own property records rather than a real estate website, and pulling them costs nothing but your evening. That last part mat
Moving to Lockport, IL: Should You Buy a Home Here?
Lockport is the only town on my list where you can stand on a street that was laid out around a canal lock from 1848 and be looking at a subdivision that did not exist four years ago. That is not a slogan. It is the actual reason the numbers in this article behave strangely, and it is the reason a t
Haunted Houses in the Southwest Suburbs (From Family-Friendly to Genuinely Terrifying)
Fall out here comes with a real range of Halloween options, and they are not all the same speed. Some are gentle pumpkin farms built for a two-year-old's first hayride, and some are 150-actor nightmares you will feel in your chest for a week. I am honestly both kinds of person: I am the dad taking t
How to Appeal Your Property Taxes in Kankakee County (and How to File It Yourself)
Kankakee County publishes assessment changes in September and sets a single final appeal date in October for the entire county. The county posts that exact date each year, and filing the appeal costs you nothing. I know the process works because I ran it on my own house. My assessment jumped about 2
How I Rate Southwest Suburb Towns (and What Each Star Actually Means)
Every town guide I write ends with a star rating across eight categories. This page defines every one of them: what is measured, where the number comes from, and what separates three stars from four. I am putting this in writing for a simple reason. Almost every town rating online tells you a place
The Best Paved Bike Trails in the Southwest Suburbs (and Which One to Ride First)
I have ridden Midewin twice over the years and none since I moved out here, but mostly because somebody told me it was flat and I believed them. They were right. What I did not know until I started actually looking is how much paved trail is sitting within twenty minutes of my house, and how much of
How to Appeal Your Property Taxes in Will County (and How to File It Yourself)
My assessment jumped about 25 percent, and my first reaction was the same one most people have, which is to assume somebody official had already checked the number and it must be right. Nobody had checked it. I appealed on comparable properties, and the valuation came down somewhere in the range of
Moving to Palos Heights, IL: Should You Buy a Home Here?
The three Palos villages are easy to blur together, and Palos Heights is the one that sits in the middle, in price, in feel, and on the map. It offers something its two neighbors do not: an actual walkable downtown, plus Lake Katherine and a close-in Metra station, wrapped around a settled, establis
Moving to Palos Hills, IL: Should You Buy a Home Here?
The three Palos villages get talked about as one place, but they are not, and Palos Hills is the one that surprises people. It is the affordable, denser, more practical member of the trio, home to Moraine Valley Community College and a housing mix heavy on condos, townhomes, and modest single-family