Chicago Real Estate Pros Favor Pat Hynes in Assessor Race

Chicago’s real estate pros are banking on a new Cook County Assessor taking office, after spending years lamenting changes to the local property tax system.

Top real estate developers like Magellan Development CEO David Carlins, CRG CEO Shawn Clark and Riverside Investment and Development CEO John O’Donnell have all made five-figure donations to Patrick Hynes’ campaign to oust incumbent Assessor Fritz Kaegi in the March 17 Democratic primary, public records show. Carlins has given at least $40,000, while O’Donnell and entities with ties to his firm Riverside have donated a total of $30,000, records show.

Hynes, who has served as the tax assessor for the southwest suburban Lyons Township since 2021 and worked in the Cook County Assessor’s Office for two decades prior, has so far courted donations from leading Chicago real estate professionals as well as construction labor unions.

“For too long, Fritz Kaegi’s unpredictable and volatile property tax assessments have left Cook County working families struggling to pay the bills,” an endorsement from the Chicago Federation of Labor read. “Pat will put the Assessor’s Office back on track, giving Cook County’s working class the certainty of rational and predictable assessments.”

So far, Hynes has collected at least $235,000 from real estate-related figures, making up about 22 percent of his total donations, an analysis of public campaign finance data from The Real Deal found. Multifamily investor Stuart Handler’s firm TLC Management, Related Midwest executive Don Biernacki, former Cinespace owner turned real estate investor and lender Alexander Pissios and developer Warren Baker all chipped in for Hynes, as well.

Kaegi, who was elected in 2019, has become politically vulnerable over the last few years. Commercial real estate players have slammed his approach to re-assessing property values in the wake of the pandemic.

“The fact that the assessments of office buildings are continuing to increase with no acknowledgment of the impact of the pandemic doesn’t seem objective. It’s not consistent with what’s happening in other markets or what’s happening in our market,” Farzin Parang, executive director of the Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago, said when the latest downtown assessments were released in November.

Kaegi was also subject to an investigation led by the Chicago Tribune and the Illinois Answers Project that found he missed $444 million in increases to taxable value among properties in Cook County that had recently been renovated.

And during the current assessment cycle, he took heat for sending tax bills out four months later than usual due to technical issues, though his office wasn’t solely to blame.

In July, the Cook County Democratic Primary endorsed Hynes over Kaegi.

Still, Kaegi came in as a reform candidate after associates of the prior assessor, Joseph Berrios, were caught up in corruption scandals that led to multiple members of his office facing criminal charges.

“He is a fair and honest person and we need more of that,” said Kim Krerbis, a Chicago-based residential real estate agent with @properties Christie’s International Real Estate who donated to Kaegi’s campaign.

The campaign put out a press release criticizing Hynes for accepting over 100 political donations from property tax attorneys, calling the support “a massive conflict of interest,” and Kaegi seeks to distance himself from developers.

“When big commercial properties get tax cuts they don’t deserve, homeowners pay for it. It’s a blatant conflict of interest that the Cook County Inspector General has been sounding the alarm on for years,” Kaegi told TRD. “It’s why I’ve never taken a dime from property tax appeal attorneys and never will.”

Kaegi’s campaign finances found attorneys listed who work at law firms that offer property tax services but the individual donors appeared to specialize in other areas, a TRD analysis of public records found. Since the last election cycle, Kaegi has accepted about $400,000 in donations from real estate-related figures, making up about 6 percent of his total donations, public records show.

Krebis said she sees Kaegi’s reform efforts as attempts to level the playing field between major corporate landlords and developers and the average homeowner.

“If you are a wealthy person on the North Side, I can see how you would not want Kaegi to continue,” Krebis said. “He has reviewed the city as a whole and seen that people on the South Side are being over-assessed.”

The local union representing government workers, The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 31, is also backing Kaegi.

“Our union endorsed Assessor Kaegi for reelection because he has championed important reforms to how assessments are made in Cook County — making the system fairer for working families — and because he respects the expertise and dedication of the union members who work in the assessor’s office,” said Anders Lindall, AFSCME Council 31’s Director of Public Affairs.

But a long list of construction-related unions have donated to Hynes’ campaign, including local chapters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Chicago Federation of Labor, Plumbers Local and the Chicagoland Associated General Contractors, among others.

Representatives of the construction unions that donated to Hynes didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Developers in the city often blame fluctuations in property tax assessments for the city’s historic drought in multifamily construction and a growing list of stalled megaprojects.

Shortly after taking office in 2019, Kaegi was tasked with re-assessing commercial properties in the wake of the pandemic. As commercial properties lose value, the county’s tax burden gets shifted onto residential property owners.

Meanwhile, residential property owners in lower-income areas of the county have still been hit with major increases in property values, and thus their share of the county’s tax bill. West Garfield Park experienced the steepest increases in the most recent cycle, with median homeowner bills up nearly $2,000, or 133 percent. Kaegi has attributed such patterns to the Cook County Board of Review’s willingness to slash property values for commercial landlords who file appeals of their assessments.

In response, Hynes’ campaign has stressed that as assessor, his role would be to attract more business and development to the city to expand its tax base and spread the burden across more taxpayers. If elected, he plans to establish a Department of Economic Development within the Assessor’s Office.

So far, it appears that business leaders have taken notice of Hynes’ approach. The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and the Illinois Restaurateurs Association both made donations to his campaign.

Not everyone in the industry has been convinced yet. Longtime real estate investor Bob Wislow’s firm Parkside Realty, as well as JDL Development’s Jim Letchinger, who is taking on the Lincoln Yards turnaround project renamed as Foundry Park, have each donated to Kaegi’s campaign instead of Hynes. So did Chicago-based real estate investment firm JRG Capital Partners. Letchinger and representatives of Parkside and JRG didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Early voting in the primary began Feb. 5. Whoever wins the Democratic primary is heavily favored to win the general election in November against the only other candidate in the race, Libertarian Nico Tsatsoulis.