Page 1 - Illinois Realtors plans $1 million campaign against transfer-tax increase Crains 1.30.24

Illinois Realtors plans $1 million campaign

against transfer-tax increase

By Dennis Rodkin

Credit: Bloomberg

January 30, 2024 03:55 PM

A statewide real estate trade group plans to spend about $1 million on a campaign against the Bring Chicago Home
ordinance, beginning in the next few weeks, the group’s chief tells Crain’s.

That’s in addition to a little under a quarter-million spent in 2023. It’s also more money than the ordinance’s
supporters are reported to have lined up.

“We’re going to tell Chicago voters that it will harm the city if you create another real estate tax in a city where we’re
already overly burdened with real estate taxes,” Jeff Baker, CEO of Springfield-based Illinois Realtors, said in a
meeting with several Crain’s reporters on Jan. 30.

Bring Chicago Home is the proposal to add a surcharge to the existing transfer tax that buyers pay at the time of
closing their purchase of a commercial or residential property. Because the surcharge would apply only to
transactions of $1 million or more and create a new city revenue stream budgeted for fighting homelessness, Baker
and others describe it as a new tax, although in a technical sense it’s a tax increase.

Baker told Crain’s that “in the next week or so,” the group will roll out a digital ad campaign on social media and
streaming services, and plans to spend “about $1 million.”

On the other side, the lead organizers of support for the proposal had raised about $700,000 as of mid-
January, Justin Laurence reported for Crain’s.

Illinois Realtors’ campaign against the proposal will entail “about four to six weeks of digital ads, mail and media
outreach and get-out-the vote fieldwork,” Baker said, “to try to get the message out as much as possible that we
think BHC will be harmful to the real estate economy of the city.”

The proposal on the March 19 ballot would allow the city to increase the transfer tax buyers pay, now 0.75% of the
sale price, to 2% on sales valued at $1 million to $1.5 million and to 3% on sales valued at over $1.5 million. Below
$1 million, the 0.75% transfer tax would go down to 0.60%. The amount that sellers pay would not change.

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