Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Illinois

You may want to contact the title company who prepared the RESPA and confirm what happened with the second installment and ask why there was not a credit through April 3.

You should also send a certified letter to your attorney indicating that you have left many emails and that she has not responded to any of the emails and outlining the issues in the letter asking her to look into the situation asap and to contact you.

Based on your zip code it appears you are in or near Cicero, IL in Cook County. This may be important.

You may have bigger problems if you can't pay the extra $592.82 per month, because if the full taxes are closer to $6,500 per year that is most probably going to be for the years to come*. That means someone under-estimated what the full tax bill would be, and you're the one stuck with the situation. Which leads me to believe there is more here and you need to definitely seek legal help if the closing attorney won't help you. And by the way, if the closing attorney did the right thing at closing and something else is going on, you'd have to pay even that attorney for legal work relating to this matter because most closing attorney's fees include only the closing, plus maybe mailing you your title policy when it is ready. And when you do talk to an attorney, make sure you bring in ALL your purchase and closing documents, because your mortgage loan application should show what the taxes were estimated at and that may be based on some representation by the seller which, if false, could be important. Who you bought from is important too -- if it was the builder for example. You may have a "reproration agreement" as part of your closing documents that obligates the seller to redo the proration with you and pay a bigger share of the final bill.

Based on what you've said, and there seems to be some pieces missing, and if there was no error on the "RESPA" there may be several reasons why this has happened -- these are only examples and not necessarily what happened:

1. You bought a new condo or townhome that had just been separated for 2008 tax purposes. You can tell this if the 1st installment 2008 tax bill was $0. Or it was recently separated but the seller obtained tax relief because it was unsold when taxes were last assessed. In either case that would mean that taxes once sold or fully assessed would be higher (a general rule of thumb around here is that taxes run about 1% of the purchase price). And this could mean the proration you received was based on much lower taxes for either an incomplete or vacant new home. If this was the case and you obtained a "reproration agreement" at closing that may help you for 2008 taxes, but not future taxes.

2. You purchased an older used home/condo/townhome where the taxes the seller had been paying were much less because of a lot of factors. Both the listing information and your real estate sale contract should show what the seller paid most recently prior to putting the house up for sale, most likely the 2007 taxes paid in 2008. Assuming that was the case if you paid a current market price that was much higher than what the seller had paid years ago, the assessor very easily could have picked up the sale as it was early enough in the year, and recalculated the assessed valuation. A good closing attorney, given the chance to do an attorney review of this kind of contract, may not have been able to do anything about the taxes but may have been able to identify the possibility that the taxes would be going up dramatically from what the seller had been paying.

3. The home was part of a township reassessment and you were not informed of the proposed amount, which may have been a lot higher.

4. The seller had made costly improvements to the home to sell it, and a building permit application disclosed the amount, which becomes taxable, and may have been added to the assessment for 2008 and resulted in higher taxes.

But the bottom line is that 2nd installment 2008 real estate taxes were due in Cook County last week, and now interest is running. Get to an attorney with all your papers as soon as you can, and good luck!!!

*PS if the 2008 taxes were based on a higher valuation, however, and you purchased at a "distress price", you may have some recourse for 2009 and subsequent year taxes, but the value of the home for 2008 taxes may be a done deal, and your only relief may be if the RESPA is wrong or if you have a reproration agreement that protects you. As to 2009 and subsequent year taxes, you may have to fight the assessed value to get any future relief.