The taxes will generally be based on the value of the house, but there may be a couple factors in play here:
1. The lower tax house may not have been sold in a long time, so the assessed value may be artificially low. Similarly, maybe somebody paid too much for the higher tax house if it changed hands recently. Could also be that the assessor doesn't know about the finished basement and the porch converted to a 3rd bedroom if no building permits were acquired.
2. Different neighborhoods have different tax rates based on the specifics of taxing bodies (e.g. school district, park district, library, etc.). For example, if the lower tax house is in an unincorporated area it may not have the same level of local services. Houses in different school districts, in particular, may have quite different taxes.
Also, don’t basements not count towards the square footage of livable space for taxes? So two houses may have 2k square feet but one has a 600 sq feet basement it’s taxed less?
one of the things that's unusual to me about property taxes here is the many layers of taxing bodies. For example, parts of Tinley might be in district 228 or 230 for high school taxing bodies, and 140, 146, or 151 for elementary taxing bodies. Each of these taxing bodies can have wildly different amounts.
1) Homeowners can have various "exemptions" that reduce the taxed value of the house. For example, being the owner-occupant of a house grants one exemption where I live, being a senior citizen gets another. So a rented out house may have very high taxes compared to an identical house in the same area that the senior owner(s) live in, and neither of those tax bills would match your tax bill.
2) Some towns have a much larger commercial and industrial tax base, and so pass along reduced taxes to residential property. IIRC, Tinley has less commerce going on relative to neighbors like Orland.
3) the county matters. If you're looking around Tinley, you're search is likely straddling Will and Cook counties. I believe Will generally has lower taxes.
4) Different Townships are assessed at different times, I believe it's a 3 year cycle, but it varies by county. So with home values now the highest they've been, if Tinley was recently assessed and the other area is lagging, the other area may be low until the county assessment catches up. It's certainly a pain point that rapidly rising home prices have driven up property taxes, but if you buy a home at the high price, you'd have a hard time convincing the assessor the house isn't worth what you paid for it
both preoperites are in tinley and both are cook. Would be be a different township if they are 3 miles apart. From the picture it looks like both place are own by families, and not seniors. From what I can tell it looks like the house is view at twice what the seller is asking for.
Edit: Looks like Tinley does sit across Townships, so really depends where the property is.
It may be the owner of one of the houses fought the assessed value and won, while the other either didn't fight or wasn't successful. Are they in different school districts? Schools make up a massive chunk of taxes around here.
You can look up the exemption and assessed value appeals history here: https://www.cookcountypropertyinfo.com/ You can also use this to just see the tax bill directly and compare line items. Tax bills are public domain...just broadly uninteresting unless it's your own.
Of course it’s possible for some towns to be in multiple townships. Some towns are even in multiple counties.
Brookfield is in Riverside, Proviso and Lyons township. Burr Ridge and Hinsdale have portions of their town in cook county and the rest in dupage county.
Here are the districts I'm a part of, to give you an idea why:
* Fire District
* Park District
* Community College District
* County
* Airport
* Forest Preserve
* School District (very important one, always the biggest)
* Library
* City
* Township (different than City)
* Township Roads
My neighbors about a quarter mile away - if that - live in about 5 different districts. A half mile another direction, different school district. In fact I'm near the corner of 3 different school districts. You really have to look at the individual address - not city! - to know the property taxes.
Big thing to check when you look at property taxes of an address - check for homeowner and retirement exemptions. Assuming this is your primary residence and you aren't retired, you will get a homeowner exemption but will not get a retirement exemption. If a place is too good to be true, it might be because of a retirement exemption that you aren't going to get.
Excellent job catching the discrepancy. Those dollars really add up over time. In Illinois each local county, school district, college district, fire district, forest preserve board, city, etc each has their own tax levy and they each set their own rates independently of each other. So you’ll find that the rates vary widely from county to county or school district to school district. I live two counties away from cook- my best friend lives in cook with a two story brick bungalow twice the size of my wooden house and pays half of what I do in property taxes. My local secondary school district takes 30% of my property taxes and they continue to raise the rates every year. Where I live we don’t have a lot of retail or manufacturing or anything so everything is funded with property taxes, whereas in cook county they have high sales taxes and high taxes on hotels and stuff, so they use that instead of property taxes- but their schools aren’t great. But where I live the schools are amazing but the local government is a joke and doesn’t hardly provide anything for anyone- we don’t even have hardly any sidewalks and no public transportation so you must own a car to do anything. When buying a house in the area, you really need to evaluate the quality of the schools, what kind of services are provided by your local government, what are your transportation needs, do you have HOA fees, etc. it varies wildly from town to town.
Yeah it is pretty crazy, I looked at other house on the same street, and down the street same neighborhood, about 800 sq ft difference, and 70k difference half the prices on assessment.
You can look up a detailed tax bill for each property in the county which includes the formula they use to determine your tax and where all of it goes, including which expeditions they’re claiming right now (e.g., homeowner, senior, etc.).
Other people have talked about how taxes vary from municipality to municipality and township to township, but the other big discrepancy is in assessed value. That’s kind of a black box I think. The south suburbs were reassessed this year and each part of the county is reassessed every third year. You can always appeal the assessed value too to try to reduce your tax bill.
Cook County has a senior exemption and a primary residence exemption. So if you compare two houses of the same value in the same place, but one is owned by an old person who lives there, and the other is a rental property they will have wildly different taxes. Just the senior exemption alone can be large if an old person has lived in the house for a long time compared to other houses in the neighborhood that have sold more recently. This is something to ask your realtor about so you aren't blind sided by much higher taxes when you buy from an old couple.
Imagine you have a school district and a park district and both want to raise $20k a year.
There are three houses with equal assessed values on the same block.
The first two houses are in the school district, and the second two houses are in the park district.
The first two houses in the school district with the same assessed value, they pay $10k a year each to the school district. Similarly the second two houses pay $10k a year into the park district.
But remember, there's only three houses. The house in the middle that is in both the school district and the park district pays $10k to the schools and $10k to the parks, for a total tax bill of $20k.
The gist is that taxing bodies overlap in weird ways like this all over Illinois. For example depending on where you live, you may not have a "unified" school district (all schools from K-12 in the same district). You can be in different school districts within the same town/neighborhood for K-8 or K-5 and they can have pretty drastically different budgets, which leads to different property tax rates.
Also, while you get your tax bill from the county, it's not the county that determines how much tax you pay directly. They just calculate it. The way it works is by taking all the jurisdictions your property is in, calculating the proportion of your property's assessed value to the total assessed value of all the properties in that jurisdiction, and multiplying that ratio by the tax set by the jurisdiction (city council, school board, etc).
The way that assessed value is calculated depends on the county, iirc it's 10% of fair market value for residential. The way they calculate this can change depending on the county - in Cook, they reassess value for all properties on a 3 year cycle, between northern suburbs, southern suburbs, and Chicago.
I live in Cook County, I know. I never said it was the highest, but it is high, in my opinion. But to each is own. Thanks for the downvotes silly bastards.
Taxes are fun in Illinois. There is state, county, and local property tax. A house 1 block away might have a different rate because its across an invisible line for a park district or school district, As for appealing... no, its not easy. Well, it is, its a form, but realistically, its going to be denied 7 out of 10 times even when it is clear they are wrong. You can hire law firms to do it for you, but they will charge a significant chunk of any savings you did get.
At the end of the day, always remember Illinois is one of the bar none highest taxed states in the US. We make California and Texas rates look very very cheap in comparison
Its not a line item, the local governments collect and kick it back. States themselves do not administer property tax. They are administered at the local level and flow upwards until the funds trickle back down
[https://www.cookcountytreasurer.com/pdfs/understandingyourtaxbill/propertytaxprimer.pdf](https://www.cookcountytreasurer.com/pdfs/understandingyourtaxbill/propertytaxprimer.pdf)
I am not sure what you are getting at but I really wish you would just say it instead of playing a 5 year olds game of "gotcha"
[https://tax.illinois.gov/research/taxstats/propertytaxstatistics.html](https://tax.illinois.gov/research/taxstats/propertytaxstatistics.html)
Half way down the page under 2022, State Assessed Property Before Exemptions will clearly show you that property taxes are collected by the state, and since the state does not administer property taxes, the local taxing body kicks it back up to the state.
You can go on to the assessor website, at least in Cook County, and look up the tax bill by address. You have to look at the tax rate to compare between townships. Towns like Tinley Park must have a higher tax rate. I live in the city and the tax rate is lower than a family member who lives in Northlake, a blue collar town, and even though my house is worth more, their taxes are more. It’s because their tax rate is 2-3% higher than Chicago’s.
And Lake County got that good stuff from the 60s and are still riding that wave 70 years later. I looked at a house last year that had almost 45k in property taxes on it in Lake County. I own rentals in DuPage and they would be on the market the second I found out DuPage is raising rates to match Lake County
Probably because taxes in Cook County are the cheapest in the state and are subsidized in large part by the high taxes on...everything... in the city of Chicago. House for house compared between Lake and Cook, Lake will be 2-3x the property taxes. DuPage is closer to 2x the taxes. Dont confuse house value with tax rate. They are only loosely based on each other while totally separate in other places.
Google the cook county tax assessor website and look the property up. Owner might have senior citizen discount or the assessed property value may be lower than what they are selling for. You’ll also see the specific tax rates and how it’s calculated. When you buy for a much higher price than the assessed value on that site, expect your taxes to skyrocket after the first year
You cannot appeal the tax bill. You can, however, appeal the assessed value. There's a time window to do so - it's usually fairly soon after you receive your assessment notice, which is long before you receive the tax bill for that year. You can make the appeal yourself or hire a property tax attorney. The attorneys usually get a significant percentage of the lowered tax amount for the first year only, assuming they are successful. If you appeal on your own, you will normally need some facts to support your requested change, comps or an appraisal, not just whining that "my house is assessed for more than my neighbor's" or "a realtor told me I couldn't sell it for that much." Asking around, you'll probably hear that some attorneys are successful in appeals because they're connected. Ed Burke for example.
What type of house is it? Certain duplexes or multifamily homes get taxed way higher because they expect it to be run as a business as opposed to a primary residence
And yes your taxes will go up in 1-3 years based on the new higher value of what you paid for the house. So the taxes which may be low for many reasons (mostly old people exemptions and freezes) probably do not really reflect your near future payment amount.
Its the dirty secret of skyrocketing home values is equally matched by skyrocketing taxes (and insurance!) - and you don't exactly have any extra income from your higher house value to pay increased taxes. It's something no one really talks about or seems to understand.
property taxes are a scam. research how often schools ask for increases + other entities such as pensions. Some areas manage better than others so look at who is managing and the rate of increase.
The taxes will generally be based on the value of the house, but there may be a couple factors in play here: 1. The lower tax house may not have been sold in a long time, so the assessed value may be artificially low. Similarly, maybe somebody paid too much for the higher tax house if it changed hands recently. Could also be that the assessor doesn't know about the finished basement and the porch converted to a 3rd bedroom if no building permits were acquired. 2. Different neighborhoods have different tax rates based on the specifics of taxing bodies (e.g. school district, park district, library, etc.). For example, if the lower tax house is in an unincorporated area it may not have the same level of local services. Houses in different school districts, in particular, may have quite different taxes.
In Cook, at least, assessed value is based on nearby comps and latest sale price only if fairly recent.
Also, don’t basements not count towards the square footage of livable space for taxes? So two houses may have 2k square feet but one has a 600 sq feet basement it’s taxed less?
Basements don’t count towards square footage, but their value is included in the assessor’s value.
one of the things that's unusual to me about property taxes here is the many layers of taxing bodies. For example, parts of Tinley might be in district 228 or 230 for high school taxing bodies, and 140, 146, or 151 for elementary taxing bodies. Each of these taxing bodies can have wildly different amounts.
Believe it or not. There are parts of Tinley that are in Will county and in high school district 210….
Lemont 210? Wild
Lincoln way
https://www.lhs210.net/about-us/boundary-map
https://www.lw210.org/
1) Homeowners can have various "exemptions" that reduce the taxed value of the house. For example, being the owner-occupant of a house grants one exemption where I live, being a senior citizen gets another. So a rented out house may have very high taxes compared to an identical house in the same area that the senior owner(s) live in, and neither of those tax bills would match your tax bill. 2) Some towns have a much larger commercial and industrial tax base, and so pass along reduced taxes to residential property. IIRC, Tinley has less commerce going on relative to neighbors like Orland. 3) the county matters. If you're looking around Tinley, you're search is likely straddling Will and Cook counties. I believe Will generally has lower taxes. 4) Different Townships are assessed at different times, I believe it's a 3 year cycle, but it varies by county. So with home values now the highest they've been, if Tinley was recently assessed and the other area is lagging, the other area may be low until the county assessment catches up. It's certainly a pain point that rapidly rising home prices have driven up property taxes, but if you buy a home at the high price, you'd have a hard time convincing the assessor the house isn't worth what you paid for it
Also if the owner hasn’t been appealing every year that have an impact
both preoperites are in tinley and both are cook. Would be be a different township if they are 3 miles apart. From the picture it looks like both place are own by families, and not seniors. From what I can tell it looks like the house is view at twice what the seller is asking for.
Edit: Looks like Tinley does sit across Townships, so really depends where the property is. It may be the owner of one of the houses fought the assessed value and won, while the other either didn't fight or wasn't successful. Are they in different school districts? Schools make up a massive chunk of taxes around here. You can look up the exemption and assessed value appeals history here: https://www.cookcountypropertyinfo.com/ You can also use this to just see the tax bill directly and compare line items. Tax bills are public domain...just broadly uninteresting unless it's your own.
Of course it’s possible for some towns to be in multiple townships. Some towns are even in multiple counties. Brookfield is in Riverside, Proviso and Lyons township. Burr Ridge and Hinsdale have portions of their town in cook county and the rest in dupage county.
Tons of towns are in multiple townships. Arlington Heights is in 3 different townships believe it or not.
Thank you, I put in the information into the website, and it said it couldn't find it. I am using all the information from the website
Are you sure the properties are in Cook, then?
Go [here](https://www.cookcountyassessor.com) to find the townships.
I believe the township line is Harlem Ave… west side is Orland, east is Bremen.
Re 4: Township assessors are supposed to re-evaluate all properties every 4 years. In reality, most do it every year in the Chicago suburbs.
Here are the districts I'm a part of, to give you an idea why: * Fire District * Park District * Community College District * County * Airport * Forest Preserve * School District (very important one, always the biggest) * Library * City * Township (different than City) * Township Roads My neighbors about a quarter mile away - if that - live in about 5 different districts. A half mile another direction, different school district. In fact I'm near the corner of 3 different school districts. You really have to look at the individual address - not city! - to know the property taxes. Big thing to check when you look at property taxes of an address - check for homeowner and retirement exemptions. Assuming this is your primary residence and you aren't retired, you will get a homeowner exemption but will not get a retirement exemption. If a place is too good to be true, it might be because of a retirement exemption that you aren't going to get.
Excellent job catching the discrepancy. Those dollars really add up over time. In Illinois each local county, school district, college district, fire district, forest preserve board, city, etc each has their own tax levy and they each set their own rates independently of each other. So you’ll find that the rates vary widely from county to county or school district to school district. I live two counties away from cook- my best friend lives in cook with a two story brick bungalow twice the size of my wooden house and pays half of what I do in property taxes. My local secondary school district takes 30% of my property taxes and they continue to raise the rates every year. Where I live we don’t have a lot of retail or manufacturing or anything so everything is funded with property taxes, whereas in cook county they have high sales taxes and high taxes on hotels and stuff, so they use that instead of property taxes- but their schools aren’t great. But where I live the schools are amazing but the local government is a joke and doesn’t hardly provide anything for anyone- we don’t even have hardly any sidewalks and no public transportation so you must own a car to do anything. When buying a house in the area, you really need to evaluate the quality of the schools, what kind of services are provided by your local government, what are your transportation needs, do you have HOA fees, etc. it varies wildly from town to town.
Yeah it is pretty crazy, I looked at other house on the same street, and down the street same neighborhood, about 800 sq ft difference, and 70k difference half the prices on assessment.
You can look up a detailed tax bill for each property in the county which includes the formula they use to determine your tax and where all of it goes, including which expeditions they’re claiming right now (e.g., homeowner, senior, etc.). Other people have talked about how taxes vary from municipality to municipality and township to township, but the other big discrepancy is in assessed value. That’s kind of a black box I think. The south suburbs were reassessed this year and each part of the county is reassessed every third year. You can always appeal the assessed value too to try to reduce your tax bill.
Cook County has a senior exemption and a primary residence exemption. So if you compare two houses of the same value in the same place, but one is owned by an old person who lives there, and the other is a rental property they will have wildly different taxes. Just the senior exemption alone can be large if an old person has lived in the house for a long time compared to other houses in the neighborhood that have sold more recently. This is something to ask your realtor about so you aren't blind sided by much higher taxes when you buy from an old couple.
Imagine you have a school district and a park district and both want to raise $20k a year. There are three houses with equal assessed values on the same block. The first two houses are in the school district, and the second two houses are in the park district. The first two houses in the school district with the same assessed value, they pay $10k a year each to the school district. Similarly the second two houses pay $10k a year into the park district. But remember, there's only three houses. The house in the middle that is in both the school district and the park district pays $10k to the schools and $10k to the parks, for a total tax bill of $20k. The gist is that taxing bodies overlap in weird ways like this all over Illinois. For example depending on where you live, you may not have a "unified" school district (all schools from K-12 in the same district). You can be in different school districts within the same town/neighborhood for K-8 or K-5 and they can have pretty drastically different budgets, which leads to different property tax rates. Also, while you get your tax bill from the county, it's not the county that determines how much tax you pay directly. They just calculate it. The way it works is by taking all the jurisdictions your property is in, calculating the proportion of your property's assessed value to the total assessed value of all the properties in that jurisdiction, and multiplying that ratio by the tax set by the jurisdiction (city council, school board, etc). The way that assessed value is calculated depends on the county, iirc it's 10% of fair market value for residential. The way they calculate this can change depending on the county - in Cook, they reassess value for all properties on a 3 year cycle, between northern suburbs, southern suburbs, and Chicago.
I live in Cook County, I know. I never said it was the highest, but it is high, in my opinion. But to each is own. Thanks for the downvotes silly bastards.
Taxes are fun in Illinois. There is state, county, and local property tax. A house 1 block away might have a different rate because its across an invisible line for a park district or school district, As for appealing... no, its not easy. Well, it is, its a form, but realistically, its going to be denied 7 out of 10 times even when it is clear they are wrong. You can hire law firms to do it for you, but they will charge a significant chunk of any savings you did get. At the end of the day, always remember Illinois is one of the bar none highest taxed states in the US. We make California and Texas rates look very very cheap in comparison
Which line item on your tax bill is levied by the state of Illinois?
Its not a line item, the local governments collect and kick it back. States themselves do not administer property tax. They are administered at the local level and flow upwards until the funds trickle back down [https://www.cookcountytreasurer.com/pdfs/understandingyourtaxbill/propertytaxprimer.pdf](https://www.cookcountytreasurer.com/pdfs/understandingyourtaxbill/propertytaxprimer.pdf)
The IDOR sets the equalization ratios. Which taxing agencies send their collected property taxes to the state?
I am not sure what you are getting at but I really wish you would just say it instead of playing a 5 year olds game of "gotcha" [https://tax.illinois.gov/research/taxstats/propertytaxstatistics.html](https://tax.illinois.gov/research/taxstats/propertytaxstatistics.html) Half way down the page under 2022, State Assessed Property Before Exemptions will clearly show you that property taxes are collected by the state, and since the state does not administer property taxes, the local taxing body kicks it back up to the state.
You can go on to the assessor website, at least in Cook County, and look up the tax bill by address. You have to look at the tax rate to compare between townships. Towns like Tinley Park must have a higher tax rate. I live in the city and the tax rate is lower than a family member who lives in Northlake, a blue collar town, and even though my house is worth more, their taxes are more. It’s because their tax rate is 2-3% higher than Chicago’s.
Property tax here works like property taxes just about everywhere else. Take look at the houses exemptions. Google your counties tax assessor
That’s not actually true.
Just be aware of Cook County ( AKA Crook County). The taxes are crazy.
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And Lake County got that good stuff from the 60s and are still riding that wave 70 years later. I looked at a house last year that had almost 45k in property taxes on it in Lake County. I own rentals in DuPage and they would be on the market the second I found out DuPage is raising rates to match Lake County
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Probably because taxes in Cook County are the cheapest in the state and are subsidized in large part by the high taxes on...everything... in the city of Chicago. House for house compared between Lake and Cook, Lake will be 2-3x the property taxes. DuPage is closer to 2x the taxes. Dont confuse house value with tax rate. They are only loosely based on each other while totally separate in other places.
Cook's been going up though. The main reason they used to be lower is commercial property pays a larger share in cook county vs the rest of the state.
Google the cook county tax assessor website and look the property up. Owner might have senior citizen discount or the assessed property value may be lower than what they are selling for. You’ll also see the specific tax rates and how it’s calculated. When you buy for a much higher price than the assessed value on that site, expect your taxes to skyrocket after the first year
The lower tax home might have a senior citizen exemption. Taxes will go up when you buy.
You cannot appeal the tax bill. You can, however, appeal the assessed value. There's a time window to do so - it's usually fairly soon after you receive your assessment notice, which is long before you receive the tax bill for that year. You can make the appeal yourself or hire a property tax attorney. The attorneys usually get a significant percentage of the lowered tax amount for the first year only, assuming they are successful. If you appeal on your own, you will normally need some facts to support your requested change, comps or an appraisal, not just whining that "my house is assessed for more than my neighbor's" or "a realtor told me I couldn't sell it for that much." Asking around, you'll probably hear that some attorneys are successful in appeals because they're connected. Ed Burke for example.
What type of house is it? Certain duplexes or multifamily homes get taxed way higher because they expect it to be run as a business as opposed to a primary residence
Single Family Home
And yes your taxes will go up in 1-3 years based on the new higher value of what you paid for the house. So the taxes which may be low for many reasons (mostly old people exemptions and freezes) probably do not really reflect your near future payment amount. Its the dirty secret of skyrocketing home values is equally matched by skyrocketing taxes (and insurance!) - and you don't exactly have any extra income from your higher house value to pay increased taxes. It's something no one really talks about or seems to understand.
Oh, it's talked about plenty especially around the time tax bills are sent out. See NextDoor for anywhere in Lake County this week...
property taxes are a scam. research how often schools ask for increases + other entities such as pensions. Some areas manage better than others so look at who is managing and the rate of increase.