Update: Data is now available for 2016 to the first half of 2019.
You can now use Chicago Cityscape to browse and locate property transactions in Cook County. Currently we have all of the transactions that took place in 2017-2018; we’ll add more after we gather feedback from our users on how they want to see and use the data.
Property transactions are subject to a Real Estate Transfer Tax, known as “stamp duty” in other places. The State of Illinois and each county gets a cut of the RETT, as well as Chicago and the Chicago Transit Authority for transactions that take place here. When it’s paid, Cook County takes a note and sends the data on to the Illinois Department of Revenue (IDOR), which updates a public dataset each quarter.
The “PTAX” data, as IDOR calls it, tells who sold what to whom and for how much. There were 118,026 declared property transactions in Cook County last year — not all of them were “arm’s length”, though.
An arm’s length transaction is one between two parties that don’t know each other. Many of the transactions are between family members and trusts, which aren’t arm’s length — these kinds of transactions also don’t have a value, and thus no money is exchanged and no RETT is collected.
The priciest transaction was Sterling Bay, in a joint venture with Wanxiang Real Estate Group, purchasing One and Two Prudential Plazas for $680 million from 601W [1]. The sale was widely reported in the media.
4 ways to find transactions
- Look up an address or PIN on Address Snapshot and scroll down until you see “Property Sales” — then click “Load property sales”.
- Browse the master table — search for buyer and seller names
- Property Finder: Move the map around the county to see what was sold and where
- Show all property transactions in a given Place — Try Woodlawn, for example, and scroll down to “Property Sales”; you could also choose a community area, Ward, ZIP code, or Cook County commissioner district
[1] Other companies were involved in the purchase and sale of the two buildings, which CoStar lists.