Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi is pushing the federal government to release property appraisal data to the country’s largest assessors to help improve the accuracy of property tax assessments, which have received criticism locally for being systemically flawed.
A resolution sponsored by Kaegi calls for the Federal Housing Finance Agency to hand data containing “millions of property appraisals” over to 16 of the nation’s largest assessment offices, according to a news release.
The assessor made the request just a day before the Senate on Thursday confirmed President Trump’s nominee Bill Pulte as head of the FHFA, which collects appraisal records from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Pulte’s stance on Kaegi’s idea is unclear; Pulte is the grandson of the late William Pulte, who started one of the nation’s largest homebuilders, Pulte Homes, in Detroit in the 1950s.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency compiles Fannie and Freddie appraisals into a Uniform Appraisal Dataset that contains parcel-level property characteristics. Most of this data is inaccessible to government assessors, but Kaegi and 15 other assessment offices across the country are hoping to change that.
The Kaegi-backed proposal’s supporters said it would aid in addressing a common problem encountered by Cook County homeowners: Less expensive homes tend to be overvalued for taxes relative to their actual sale price, while pricier homes tend to be undervalued for taxes in an issue known as “regressivity.”
This means that working class and low income families end up paying more than their fair share in property taxes or can’t pay at all, putting a strain on the local municipality that relies on property tax revenue to fund public services. This has been particularly true for small towns in the South suburbs of Chicago that have a higher concentration of working class homeowners hit with overvaluations.
“In recent years, we’ve eliminated a large portion of the regressivity in Cook County’s residential assessments,” Kaegi said in the release. “With the release of this data, we would be able to clear one of the final hurdles to achieving thoroughly fair and accurate assessments.”
A 2022 University of Chicago study cited the main causes of regressivity as “limitations in the data and methods used in assessment,” specifically a lack of data about property characteristics that might factor into calculating a property’s assessed value. A study by Josh Myers Valuation Solutions also attributed the undervaluation of commercial properties, in part, to “lack of data-sharing.”
The resolution got a boost from the National Association of Counties’ Board of Directors, which endorsed the measure in a March 1 annual legislative conference, according to the release. Kaegi’s co-sponsor on the bill is Eddie Cook, the assessor of Maricopa County, Arizona, which includes the city of Phoenix.
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