Chicago office buildings among most expensive outside NYC

Willis Tower had Chicago’s highest tax bill

Willis Tower, One Prudential Plaza and Old Post Office Building (Willis Tower, One Two Pru, Post433)
Willis Tower, One Prudential Plaza and Old Post Office Building (Willis Tower, One Two Pru, Post433)

Chicago has some of the nation’s priciest office buildings.

Of 20 properties with the highest property taxes outside New York, 15 are in Chicago, the Chicago Business Journal found, citing New York-based PropertyShark. The Willis Tower had the highest, at about $43 million last year, lagging behind 11 others in New York, including the $75 million bill for the General Motors Building.

Rounding out Chicago’s five priciest were 300 East Randolph and One Prudential Plaza at $24 million; the Old Post Office building at $25 million; and 300 North LaSalle at $27 million. The oldest property on the list is the Field Building, built in 1934. It landed at 19 out of 20, with a 2021 tax bill of $13.7 million.

PropertyShark ranked the office properties with the highest associated tax rates and verified the tax values with the assessor and treasurer websites. It excluded properties with tax exemptions from the ranking.

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Cook County taxes properties in biennial installments. The filing season for the second half of 2021 will begin in the third quarter of this year, so PropertyShark had to estimate the tax bills for the rest of 2021 in Cook County.

Residential rents in Chicago, meantime, are on the rise. The median rent for a one-bedroom Windy City apartment jumped 6.3 percent in June from May to $1,870, an increase of almost a third over the past year.

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[CBJ] — Victoria Pruitt