Our biggest update ever: 19 new and updated features

Chicago Cityscape ends 2023 with the biggest set of improvements. Q4 has the most updates since we started publishing them — there are 19 in this post.

Property Finder improvements

• The 2021 Cook County annual tax sale properties are now included in Property Finder with their own filter. There are 27,930 properties in Chicago and 26,971 properties not in Chicago included in the sale occurring January 9-16, 2024.
• An arms length transaction filter in Property Finder and Property Sales Browser makes it easier for appraisers and brokers looking for comparable, by excluding certain sales (get the exclusion details).
• Proximity to a main street. Look for properties that are located on a classic main street, qualities that include: several locally-owned businesses, a low number of car-oriented businesses, and a variety of businesses that fulfill people’s daily needs. (The “main streets” were selected based on a study by Emily Talen and Hyesun Jeong.)
• There’s a new way to find vacant lots: No building on site. Why use this? It provides an additional way to overcome the data update schedules of our other sources. Sometimes a vacant lot classification is assigned more than one year after the property becomes a vacant lot. Read more.
• Properties for which we have sale data are shown with a diagonal stripe on most property maps (see the screenshot below).

Totally new features

• Property Reports that are PIN-based will show a new “Similar Properties” section that shows the photos and addresses of properties that are close by, have similar classifications, similar last sale date, and ownership.

• Property recordings are brand new as of November. They appear as a list in PIN-based Property Reports and as a filter in Place Reports. Find mortgages, deeds, and more. We also use recordings to highlight certain property sales that were probably supposed to be submitted to — but may not have — IDOR’s MyDec.
• Amtrak intercity passenger rail lines is a new Place Report type. We show the lines that are state supported and terminate at Chicago Union Station (this includes lines that go to St. Louis, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Milwaukee, and places in between those cities and Chicago. In Place Reports these lines will appear if they intersect the Place and in Property Reports these will appear in Surrounding Places if the line is within 1 mile. View the map.

Incentives Checker improvements

• We added three new incentives: (1) the special 7th Senate District — covering Chicago’s north lakefront area — small business grant program; (2) Chicago TIF districts where the TIF Purchase-Rehab program for renovating and selling dilapidated houses is in effect; (3) SBIF Target Corridors where additional priority is given to applicants for SBIF grants. Look up an address’s available geographic incentives.
• The updated Difficult Development Areas (DDA) and Qualified Census Tracts (QCT) for 2024 are now being checked in Incentives Checker. These are useful for municipal government staffers and organizations proposing to use LIHTC to build affordable housing.

Property Report improvements

All of these improvements work for subscribers and for those who purchased a Property Report à la carte.

• We made improvements to the dwelling unit calculator. It’s now possible to change the lot size in addition to being able to change the zoning district. Changing the lot size could be useful in case you intend to get an administrative adjustment to make up for “missing” lot area, or if you intend to acquire more area, or if you just want to play around with zoning capacity scenarios.
• A tax maps locator is now inside each Chicago-based Property Report’s Zoning Assessment, right next to the 80 Acres map locator. Tax maps, which are hosted by another organization, are useful to show lot sizes.

Cook County government updated its aerial imagery for the whole county for 2023, and we immediately added those images to Property Reports’ “Historical imagery” button. It looks like the highly-detailed photos were taken in the spring, before foliage appeared.

• All Property Finder filters in Place Report have been ported to Property Report’s Property Finder giving you a plethora of more options by which to find properties.

General updates

• We fixed the demographics report in Lending & Investment Snapshot and updated it to use the latest American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau. This is the fastest way to get demographic information for the neighborhood surrounding an address you look up (anywhere in Illinois and Indiana).
• All Chicago TIF maps have been updated. This includes boundary expansions, early termination dates (meaning some TIF districts are now hidden from the platform), and extension dates.
• Our copy of the Chicago zoning map has been updated as of December 19, 2023.
• Added four new Knowledge Base articles: Learn about Chicago zoning districts, Using built-in analytics, Using city programs to find tenants, and Features for appraisers.
• Updated five Knowledge Base articles: Research the history & age of a property, Unused Zoning Capacity: How to build additional dwelling units, Create a Personal Place to research a custom boundary, Find potentially vacant properties, and Use Property Finder to identify specific properties in a Place.

Learn how Chicago Cityscape is improving all the time and what you could take advantage of by reading our other quarterly updates.

New Property Finder filters lead Cityscape’s Q4 features update was originally published in Chicago Cityscape’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.