Civic Consulting Alliance releases study on 2018 Residential Assessments in Chicago
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
The Civic Consulting Alliance (CCA) released a study today of the 2018 assessments from the Cook County Assessor’s Office under the administration of former Assessor Joe Berrios.
The CCA’s report, titled Cook County Assessor’s Office: 2018 Chicago Triad Assessment, Residential Sales Ratio Study states that in February 2018, the Cook County Board and the Assessor’s Office (along with the Board of Review) agreed on four goals for Cook County’s assessment process: uniformity, timeliness, compliance and transparency. This report is concerned only with the Assessor’s Office’s portion of the 2018 reassessment process of the City of Chicago and does not address assessment decisions from the Cook County Board of Review.
As shown in the CCA’s report, the 2018 residential assessments for the City of Chicago missed uniformity targets and exhibited regressivity, which indicates homes with a lower market value tended to be over assessed, while homes with higher market values tended to be under assessed.
In addition, this report contains a reevaluation of the sales ratio study results in Hyde Park Township, from 2014-2016. Originally released by the CCA in February of 2018, the original analysis of Hyde Park Township was based on an incomplete sales file provided to the CCA by the Berrios administration; the sales file did not contain any data for home sales valued at less than $65,000, which amounted to 39% of sales in that township. The current report contains corrected results for Hyde Park Township.
Since beginning the reassessment of the northern suburbs of Cook County in 2019, Assessor Kaegi and his administration have met the uniformity and compliance goals in six out of the eight re-assessed townships, while narrowly missing the target in two others. Complete reports on the assessment work in each township are published at cookcountyassessor.com.
“The reports on the assessment models used by Assessor Kaegi and the current valuation and data teams demonstrate significant improvements over the residential assessment models used by the previous administration,” said Scott Smith, Chief Communications Officer and spokesperson for the Cook County Assessor’s Office. “Our office is confident that future improvements in data quality will ensure our models meet uniformity and compliance goals for all its assessments.”
To determine whether the current Assessor’s Office’s work meets uniformity and compliance goals, Assessor Fritz Kaegi has used the same standards recommended by the CCA, which are in line with recommendations of the International Association of Assessing Officers.
The Cook County Assessor’s Office will continue its re-assessment of the northern suburbs through the fall of 2019. The CCAO will re-assess the southern suburbs in 2020 and re-assess the City of Chicago in 2021.
“We will continue to build our ability to model and detect increasingly fine patterns in our assessments as we work to improve the accuracy, timeliness, and granularity of our data,” said Chief Data Officer Robert Ross. “If we are able to improve our residential data by the time we re-assess Chicago in 2021, we will be much closer to the IAAO’s recommendations for uniformity and compliance.”
Resources:
Civic Consulting Alliance reports on the Cook County Assessor’s Office: http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/CCAReports
