Chicago is scheduled for its triennial reassessment in 2021. Although the reassessment proceeds throughout Chicago’s 8 assessment townships, and Ward is not explicitly a predictor in the model used to estimate and produce property values, the Assessor’s Office provides this Ward report to provide more Cook County residents with information about their homes.

You can find your home’s township on its Reassessment Notice and on its PIN details.

Chicago’s 50th Ward is home to approximately 5,300 Class 2 single-family properties.

This report contains detailed reporting about the residential real estate market in the 50th and a self-study of assessments produced at the modeling stage of assessments. For more information about assessments and answers for frequently asked questions, please visit cookcountyassessor.com.

Assessor’s Summary

Chicago’s real estate market is robust.

Property values throughout the City have generally remained steady, or increased, since Chicago’s last reassessment in 2018. The median sale price of a 50th Ward single-family home was about $330,000 in 2018 and $370,000 in 2020. This is a change of $40,000, or 12%. Note that each individual home’s 2021 assessment may go up or down by varying percentages, because every home is different.

In 2021, our job is to produce estimated values of all homes. At the initial stage of this job, our median estimated value of 50th single-family properties was $380,000.

50th Ward 2021: Single-Family Sale Prices & Estimated Values

2020 sale prices (homes that sold) Assessor’s Office’s 2021 estimated values (all homes)
Median $370,000 $380,000
Bottom and Top Third (33rd and 66th percentiles) $330,000 - $430,000 $340,000 - $410,000

Increases in property values don’t necessarily cause the same increases in tax bills.

The Assessor does not set property tax levies, rates, or bills. But your property’s share of the total assessed value of all Chicago properties affects its share of Chicago’s property taxes. Your property’s share will depend on 2021 reassessments throughout Chicago, from homes in Chatham and Jefferson Park to commercial properties in Little Village and the Loop.

This means your home’s value can increase, while its share of property taxes could increase, decrease, or stay the same due to Chicago’s reassessment. If other properties’ assessments increase more than yours, this can shrink your home’s share of property taxes.

The 2021 reassessment will affect the property tax bill issued in the summer of 2022. Your property tax bills also list the taxing districts funded by your property taxes.

Market Report

The Assessor’s Office used 7 years of sales throughout Chicago, from 2013 through the end of 2020, to estimate home values in 2021. Below, we show data about these real estate market changes in the 50th Ward.

Median Sale Prices

Below we show year-over-year sale prices of homes in the 50th Ward. The median sale price is shown in dark green, with the light green band showing the bottom and top thirds of the market.

In 2020 – the most recent full year of data we can access – the median sale price of a 50th Ward single-family home was about $370,000, with the lower third of sale prices around $330,000 and the top third around $430,000.

Note that these are average sales trends in just this region. In Chicago’s 2021 reassessment, we use price and characteristics data for 7 years of sales throughout Chicago.

Sale volume

Fun facts

  • The top sale price for a single-family property in the 50th Ward in 2020 was $1,053,750.

  • Of all the single-family homes that sold in the 50th Ward in 2020, the average property was 1,786 square feet, 71 years old, and had 4 bedrooms and 1.5 bathrooms.

  • Of all the Class 2 multi-family homes that sold in the 50th Ward in 2020, the average property was 3,906 square feet, 84 years old, and had 7 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms.

Model & Results

How does the model know what my home is worth?

“The model” is a computerized statistical model that uses real estate market data to estimate the value of homes that haven’t sold. These models are often called Automated Valuation Models, and are the standard for conducting computer-assisted mass appraisal.

The goal of the model is to answer this question: “What would the sale price of every home be if it had sold recently in an arms-length transaction?”

To answer this question, we use a two-step process:

  1. Modeling. First, we use computer code to analyze data about home sales. Any two homes may have different characteristics (location, number of bedrooms, etc.) and sale prices. But there are consistent patterns in how characteristics affect sale prices on average. It’s important to detect these patterns accurately. To do that, we use computer code to train a predictive machine learning model, which learns to recognize complex patterns much faster than a human could. The output of this step is a model which can be used to predict any home’s sale price based on its characteristics and these learned patterns.

  2. Valuation. We then use the model created in Step 1 to predict values for all residential properties. These predicted values are the scope of this report, but these values are subject to change. Estimated values produced by the model are reviewed by software and by our expert analysts, who review assessed value changes by neighborhood and property class and make adjustments as necessary.

  3. Mailing. Finally, we mail Reassessment Notices on a township-by-township basis to homeowners with their property’s estimated market value, its characteristics, and its assessed value.

Average property values (estimated by the Assessor’s Model)

For the 2021 reassessment of the City of Chicago, we used around 504,000 sales from the last 7 years to train the model. We leveraged over two dozen characteristics for each home so that our model could detect all related patterns between characteristics and sale price, and so that our estimated home values were as accurate as possible. We used a variety of location characteristics (like school district, whether a property is close to a road, and assessor neighborhood code) and others (like flood risk and median income of the surrounding area).

You can learn more about our modeling process here:

  • Read: How the model works to produce the most accurate, uniform, non-regressive assessments we can with our current data
  • Watch: Our presentation at Chi Hack night on an earlier version of the model
  • FAQs: about the model

Property Taxes and Appeals

How will the reassessment affect my property tax bills?

It is not yet known, because tax bills are affected by taxing agencies’ funding needs and by all assessments in Chicago, which will continue throughout this year.

The Assessor does not set property tax levies, rates, or bills. But your property’s share of the total assessed value of all Chicago properties affects its share of Chicago’s property taxes. Your property’s share will depend on 2021 reassessments throughout Chicago, from homes in Chatham and Jefferson Park to commercial properties in Little Village and the Loop.

This means your home’s value can increase, while its share of property taxes could increase, decrease, or stay the same due to Chicago’s reassessment. If other properties’ assessments increase more than yours, this can shrink your home’s share of property taxes.

Property tax changes depend on assessment changes to all properties in the geographic boundaries (like Chicago) of your property’s taxing districts. It also depends on increased or decreased property tax dollars requested by taxing agencies. You can find your taxing agencies listed on the property tax bills issued by the Cook County Treasurer.

The 2021 reassessment will affect the property tax bill issued in the summer of 2022. Your property tax bills also list the taxing districts funded by your property taxes.

Neither the Assessor, nor the County or the City, receives more funding as a result of increased assessed values. The Assessor’s job, set by Illinois law, is to produce fair estimates of market value. Fair assessment of all properties helps to ensure that no property owner pays more or less than his or her fair share of property taxes. That’s why Assessor Kaegi’s goal is that all commercial, industrial, multifamily, and single-family property assessments fairly and accurately mirror the market. You can read more about the 2021 assessments of Chicago’s multifamily and commercial properties at cookcountyassessor.com.