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Your Home’s Assessed Value: How the Assessor Follows the Market

Cook County is the largest market-based assessment jurisdiction in the United States. This means
that during a reassessment year, the values of all properties are re-estimated based on recent
trends in the real estate market. Buyers and sellers set prices for homes in arm’s length
transactions, and the CCAO aggregates these market trends to impartially estimate the Fair Market
Value of all homes being reassessed.

In the north suburban reassessment in 2019, our office had access to sale data through the end of
December 31, 2018. We analyzed patterns from the last few years to increase the stability of
market value estimates.

Because reassessments are market-based, this means that during the 2019 reassessment, a north
suburban home’s assessed value doesn’t depend on what its assessed value was in a prior year. It
depends instead on recent sales trends of similar homes. A property’s assessed value can change
significantly from its prior reassessment three years earlier due to changes in the local real estate
market.

The Cook County property assessment system divides the county into three assessment districts.
Each assessment district is further separated into townships, and each of those is divided into
neighborhoods. Reassessment proceeds on a township-by-township basis.

On the following page, we show median sale prices of single-family homes throughout the thirteen
townships in the north suburbs. We include 2019 sales (which had not yet transacted at the time of
our modeling of the north suburbs in 2019, and which are not available to the CCAO until after they
have been recorded in the County’s system) as a point of comparison.

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