Tax-exempt property owner names are now part of our platform

The Cook County Assessor’s Office continues to make more data about 1.8 million properties available, to Chicago Cityscape members’ benefit. Earlier this year the CCAO published a database of the names of tax-exempt property owners, increasing the level of transparency of the convoluted property tax system in Cook County.

Chicago Cityscape quickly integrated this data about nearly 100,000 properties into Property Finder, one of our primary features in Property Report and Place Report. This blog post will (1) describe the data’s contents, (2) demonstrate how it’s been integrated, and (3) advise one way for Chicago Cityscape members to use it.

What’s in tax-exempt property owner data

Every parcel in Cook County has an ID, a property classification, and a taxpayer name and mailing address. With some exceptions.

A little over 92,300 properties in Cook County are owned by…

• state and local government authorities
• municipalities
• transportation and transit agencies
• places of worship
• colleges and universities
• non-profit organizations
• public housing authorities

There is no need to record taxpayer name and mailing address since there are no tax bills to send. However, their names are still recorded to ensure the four Cook County property “managers” — treasurer, clerk, assessor, and board of review — know that these properties are legitimately exempt.

The new database simply includes a property owner’s name; yet this name is powerful by itself because it allows one to use Property Finder to search for properties owned by specific entities and see a particular entity’s inventory in a given area of Cook County.

This is by no means a definitive source of ownership, especially as it takes time for authorities to update their databases. We advise people to use multiple sources to fully understand ownership and history of ownership of a property — Chicago Cityscape brings those sources into one platform.

How Chicago Cityscape integrated tax-exempt owner data

Chicago Cityscape has integrated the new tax-exempt owner data within Place Report’s Property Finder in two ways:

1. Members can see the names of the tax-exempt owners immediately, in a separate field as taxpayer names, to instantly discern which properties are and aren’t owned by tax-exempt entities.
2. A new filter in Property Finder permits members to search for a particular tax-exempt owner — by name or keyword — and locate all of their properties, as recorded by the Assessor’s Office, in a given locale.

Chicago Cityscape has tens of thousands of existing Place Reports, which include Chicago community areas, Cook County commissioner districts, ZIP codes, and wards. and members can draw their own Personal Places.

Additionally, Chicago Cityscape has Place Reports for the whole of the City of Chicago, and the whole of Cook County excluded Chicago.

The tax-exempt owner data has also been integrated in all maps that show parcel boundaries and attributes like property class and area.

Using the tax-exempt owner data

We have a new Knowledge Base article describing the owners in more detail, but this blog post also has a short tutorial. A quick example of how to use tax-exempt owner data would be to look for all properties in Chicago owned by the Chicago Housing Authority.

Here’s how to locate CHA properties (tutorial)

1. Open the City of Chicago Place Report.
2. In Property Finder, look for or search for the “Tax exempt status & owner” group of filters, and in the “Owner name” dropdown menu search for “CHA”.
3. The dropdown menu will show a single result for “Chicago Housing Authority (CHA)”. Select that result and select the “Apply filters”. Property Finder will apply the filter and refresh the data table results.
4. Once the data table refreshes it’s possible to see the names of the tax-exempt owners in the “Property info” columns. These names will appear in a separate column upon export.

Tip: Property Finder’s data table can be exported, which should be useful for anyone sending notices to nearby property owners; while we don’t have their mailing list this saves a step over the previous situation of having to look up the owner of each individual PIN that was missing a taxpayer name. It’s easier to look up the mailing address when the name is known.

How will you use this new information?

Tax-exempt property owner names are now part of our platform was originally published in Chicago Cityscape’s Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.