Commercial property assessments in Chicago defy logic: report

While the real estate market in Chicago is changing rapidly, the valuations of thousands of commercial and industrial properties by Cook County did not change at all from one assessment to the next, according to a ProPublica Illinois-Chicago Tribune analysis of tens of thousands of property records. Nearly 25 percent of 40,000 parcels examined in the study had identical valuations in the reassessments of 2009, 2012 and 2015, despite wildly different market conditions. The Chicago Tribune found that Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios’s office generally undervalued expensive downtown properties while overvaluing small business in poorer neighborhoods. [Chicago Tribune]