When It Comes to Tax Appeals, Numbers Are Better Than Letters

If you didn’t know it already, property tax season announces itself with a mailbox full of solicitations offering to help you appeal your assessment.

The pitches are similar, with lots of exclamation point-punctuated promises of the hypothetical savings you may see!

But here’s what you may not know: if you live in one of the city of Chicago townships and have received one of these letters it is impossible that a factual analysis with current data has been conducted because the city township reassessment data has not been released yet.

Find Out How Much You Can Save, With a Review of Your Property Data

At Kensington, we use our proprietary algorithm to run the numbers on your property, but only after the current data becomes available. We value your time as much as we value our own and you won’t hear from us until the current data is available and we have conducted a pre-analysis with our opinion that your property is over assessed. Should you choose to contact us we’ll provide you with an estimate of how much we think your assessment can be reduced, within one business day provided the county data is available, based on the specific characteristics of your property, compared to the assessment of other properties in your neighborhood with very similar characteristics.

Your Case For Appeal, Based on Numbers Not Letters

We encourage homeowners to appeal their assessment, every year, twice a year, to be sure they are not paying more than their fair share. The Cook County Assessor’s Office encourages appeals as a way to build fairness into the system. It’s an acknowledgment that the office’s initial assessment may not be an accurate reflection of your property’s taxable value.

Recent studies have made the point more dramatically, with reports of high-profile commercial buildings assessed at far below their sales price, and a University of Chicago study that estimated the system had shifted $2 billion in property taxes from property owners whose homes were undervalued to those whose homes were overvalued.

But your case for appeal is unique to your property and a proper analysis cannot be conducted until the data becomes available. At Kensington, if we do not identify grounds for significant savings, we will not take your case. When we do take on a case, our clients win about 90% of the time. When no reduction is granted, which doesn’t happen very often, our clients pay nothing.

Expert Help That Can Save You Hundreds or Thousands of Dollars

If you are a Chicago homeowner, your property is subject to triennial reassessment this year. That is a particularly good time to appeal, because reducing your assessment has the potential to cut your tax bill every year for the three year period.

Take advantage of our free, no-obligation assessment of your property tax bill and get the peace of mind that comes from knowing – in dollars, not words – how much lower your property tax bill could be.

Get Your Free Property Tax Reduction Estimate