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
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 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
How to Read Your Cook County Reassessment Notice (and What to Do in the Next 30 Days)
A letter shows up from the Cook County Assessor with a new, bigger number on it, and most people do one of two things: toss it in a drawer, or panic. Both are mistakes. That letter is your reassessment notice, and it is not a bill, it is the one window you get to challenge your home's new value befo
Cook County Property Tax Exemptions (and the Refund Most People Miss)
If you own a home in Cook County, there is a decent chance you are paying more property tax than you have to. Not because your assessment is wrong (that is a separate fight), but because an exemption you qualify for is not on your bill. And here is the part almost nobody knows: if you missed one, Co
How to Appeal Your Property Taxes in Cook County (From Someone Who Did It)
A couple of years ago I opened my own reassessment notice and my stomach dropped. The county's estimate of what my house was worth had jumped, and I knew exactly what that meant for the tax bill coming behind it. So I did something most people never do. I appealed it myself. No attorney, no firm, no
Illinois Property Taxes: The Number That Changes Everything in the Chicago Suburbs
I have a friend, I will call him Perry, who bought a home in a Chicago suburb that had not been reassessed for property taxes in quite a while. His first year of ownership, two things happened at once: his individual property got reassessed, and the entire county went through a reassessment at the s