Board of Review Halfway Through 2020 Appeal Rulings ... Results for all 19 Completed Townships Available Online
March 04, 2021 7
Greetings Cook County property owners and PTS clients,
The following is an update on where we stand in the adjudication of our 2020 property tax assessment appeals...
Last week, the Cook County Board of Review issued results on five more Townships worth of appeals — Barrington, Elk Grove, Leyden, New Trier, and Wheeling — bringing the total number of completed Townships to 19, or half of the County.
For completed Townships (find the list here), our staff is presently hard at work putting together full results packages and, for owners whose appeals were successful, calculating invoices.
We expect our letters for all completed Townships to be in the mail before the end of March. If you are a client reading this post, though, and your property is in one of the completed Townships, you should know it's within your power to check your 2020 results right now. Official Board of Review and Assessor result letters have been uploaded by our staff to each client's site portal for all 19 completed Townships.
All you need to do to see yours is log into your account. Once logged in, to find your results, simply click your name in the upper righthand corner and then "Appeals" on the dropdown menu. Also, hit "Subscribe" to receive notifications when (a) any change is made to your property's assessment and (b) when we think you could benefit from appealing again.
2020 results so far appear to be quite good, even after the aforementioned and often discussed "Covid-19 adjustments" — which you will recall were moderate assessment reductions applied in non-reassessment Townships in anticipation of the virus' potential impact on new sale prices. (This Covid-19-associated dip in sale prices did not, in fact, materialize, but that is another story for another day in a another blog.) Townships that were up for reassessment in 2020, on the other hand, had these adjustments built into their new assessment values.
Those of you who used us to appeal your property's assessment just at the Board of Review in 2020, not the Assessor too, will notice our invoice picks up right from the point your Covid-19 adjustment (if you received one) left off. This is because these Covid-19 adjustments were applied after the adjudication of each relevant Township's Assessor appeals and before its Board of Review appeals. Consequently, there was no need to factor your Covid-19 adjustment into our invoice because it was administered before we ever entered the picture (though we address the adjustment in our invoice cover letter nonetheless).
If you signed up with us early in the year and we appealed your tax assessment at the Assessor as well, your Covid-19 adjustment appears on your invoice, precisely calculated to the dollar, with a note specifying that you were not charged for this change because it was not a product of our appeal work.
We think those of you who chose to appeal in 2020 will find their decision to have been well taken. And if you missed the boat because the Assessor's communications regarding the Covid-19 adjustments seemed to strongly indicate that the measure was tantamount to a property tax break (it wasn't) — well, 2021 might be a good time to get in touch with us.
Until next time,
PTS comms