Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Illinois

Re: Appealing Real Estate Taxes in IL

You can hire an attorney who specializes in such things (I'll refer you to one if you'd like to contact me). Such attorneys typically charge a percentage of one years' savings (there may be up to three years' savings).

Or you could try to do it yourself. If you live in Cook County, go to the Assessor's website (http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/) and click on "Appealing Your Assessment" near the top right corner. If you live in another county, try going to that county's assessor's website and following their procedure. Good luck!

Re: Appealing Real Estate Taxes in IL

Whether your property is in Cook County or in some other county in Illinois, you need to pay particular attention to the filing period in which the Assessor, Board of Review, or other body of appeal will accept your complaint. In Cook County, the Assessor issues his assessment and then grants a 30 day window in which to file an appeal to contest an assessment. His website for more information is www.cookcountyassessor.com. Outside of Cook County, it is a good idea to contact the local assessor's office and find out if their office can assist you in appealing the assessment before the issuance of a notice of assessment, or, alternatively, once an assessment issues, you have to file directly with the County Board of Review's Office. Many Township Offices within many Counties in Illinois have web-sites and a simple search on Google.com may get you to particular web-sites with appeal information, information about your property and rules of procedure for filing an appeal.

To determine whether your assessment is unreasonable, consider a few things. First, if your property was recently built, find out if you are being assessed and thereby taxed as if your home was able to be occupied for the entire year. You should only be assessed the proportionate amount of the year that your home was able to be occupied (usually determined by a Certificate of Occupancy). Second, if your home was purchased recently, make certain that the assessment fairly reflects a value AT or less than your recent purchase price. In Cook County, for example, the assessment should be no more than 10% of your home's recent purchase price. Therefore, if you purchased your home for $300,000, your assessment should be no more than 30,000. If it is more than 30,000, you should file an appeal seeking a reduction based on your recent purchase. Outside of Cook County, the assessment should be no more than 1/3 of the recent purchase price. Thus, in our previous example, the assessment should not be greater than 100,000.

Finally, in most instances, if one has been in their home for a period of time (more than 3 years), you can look to determine if there are comparable properties that are similar in size, location, age and structure (ranch vs. 2-story, etc.) to your home and compare their assessments to your own. In making a comparison, you need to look at finding the size of your home and comparable homes and you need to determine the assessments of just the building portion of the assessment (most assessments are broken down into a land assessment and a building assessment). By dividing the building assessment by the improvement size, you will obtain a value for your home by which to compare other homes. Do the same equation with the other "comparable" properties and hopefully, you will find other properties with a lower building assessment per square foot of improvement size such that you will have a basis for an appeal of your assessment.