Assessor’s Office Releases New Housing Market Tracker
Thursday, November 13, 2025
The Cook County Assessor’s Office published its new Housing Market Tracker, a first-of-its-kind, interactive map that shows real estate trends and individual sales in Chicago community areas and Cook County municipalities.
The Housing Market Tracker contains data on sale prices from 2020 to 2024 across different residential property types – single-family homes, condos, and multi-family buildings with 6 units or less. The Assessor’s Office receives these sales from the Illinois Department of Revenue and uses them to fulfill its statutory duty of updating assessments to follow market trends.
The Tracker shows that many regions of Chicago and surrounding municipalities that used to be more affordable have seen the biggest price increases from 2020 to 2024. The South Side community area of Englewood has seen median prices nearly double, from $58k to over $100k. Prices in the City of Harvey have more than doubled.
“My job, under Illinois law, is to adjust assessments so that they follow these market trends. The upside of these increases is that, for current homeowners, their equity has increased because the value of their home has increased,” said Assessor Kaegi.
“But the downsides are many: it's become harder to be a first-time homeowner, and these assessment increases can cause property tax spikes. While we have to follow the market, rising unaffordability and unpredictable tax jumps are injustices in our property tax system that must be fixed. That's why I've been advocating for affordable housing legislation to build affordable rental housing, and for property tax relief to prevent tax spikes for the most vulnerable homeowners."
The CCAO’s existing Affordable Housing Special Assessment Program (AHSAP) is on track to cover 15,000 properties by the end of 2025. AHSAP provides incentives for housing providers to maintain and build affordable housing for working-class renters across Cook County.
The CCAO has also advocated for circuit breaker legislation, a property tax relief program that helps those homeowners whose property taxes increase beyond their ability to pay. Recent research by the CCAO shows that nearly 250,000 households in Cook County have experienced a tax bill spike of at least 25% in recent years.
The Assessor’s Office is tasked with estimating the fair market value of property in Cook County. That means determining what an individual piece of property might sell for in an arm’s-length transaction.
The Housing Market Tracker contains sales data from 2020 through 2024.
“While this data was available previously, it was difficult for non-experts to understand,” said Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi. “Now, for the first time ever, homeowners, journalists and policymakers have a free and accessible tool to see what’s going on in their local real estate market and across Cook County.”
The CCAO’s residential assessments have become much fairer since 2018. A recent analysis by Professor Christopher Berry at the University of Chicago found that these fairer assessments have saved the owners of low- and middle-priced homes $1.9 billion in property taxes.
The CCAO also recently released its Home Value Report, which allows homeowners to see the real estate data and sales that were most important for determining their home’s assessment.
Here are examples of what users can see in the Housing Market Tracker:
The map shows price trends. For example, in Chicago’s West Englewood, median sale prices for single-family homes have more than doubled – from $65k in 2020 to $143k in 2024.
By clicking on a neighborhood, users can explore individual sales. For example, in the Village of Winnetka, a lakefront home sold in 2022 for $12.75M
Users can also identify individual sales by community area and municipality, filter these sales by age and other property characteristics, and explore more details through the CCAO’s website.
The new Housing Market Tracker is available at www.cookcountyassessoril.gov/cook-county-housing-market-tracker.
