Wrongly Assessed La Grange House Corrected

LA GRANGE, IL – After eight years, the Cook County assessor corrected a La Grange house's assessment that was far lower than what it sold for.

A year ago, Patch reported on the house at 412 S. Peck Ave., which sold for $675,000 in 2016.

In 2022, Cook County assessed the property at $388,000, 60 percent less than its sales price six years earlier. In 2023, the assessment increased to $470,000.

Four months after last year's Patch story, the Cook County assessor increased the assessment to $850,000.

The issue on Peck Avenue is just another example of the problems that Patch has pointed out with the Cook County Assessor's Office's assessments in Lyons Township.

No taxing bodies lost any money because of the mistake on Peck. Instead, other property taxpayers picked up the slack.

The county had said the house was 1,619 square feet, yet real estate websites listed it as 3,200.

The house was expanded in 2011, but Cook County's assessment appeared to reflect the older structure.

This photo of the house at 412 S. Peck Ave. in Las Grange on the Cook County assessor's website last year was from 2007. The house was expanded in 2011, but Cook County's assessment appeared to reflect the older structure. (Cook County Assessor's Office)

The house was advertised as three stories, yet the county had said it was two stories. The photo on the assessor's website was from 2007.

Last year, an assessor's office spokesman said his agency had last conducted a field inspection in 2012.

In an email to Patch last year, Lyons Township Assessor Patrick Hynes said under-assessed, high-value properties skew the modeling against lower-value homes.

"If the mass appraisal model thinks that 1,600 square foot homes are selling for $800k, it will spit out assessed values per square foot that are too high for the smaller homes in the market," Hynes said. "And for individual properties like 412 Peck that are actually 3,000 plus square feet but are described with 1,600 square feet, the model will spit out values that are too low."

That's exactly the opposite of what Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi promised when he ran for office, Hynes said. The result, he said, is "garbage in, garbage out."

Over the last few years, Patch has found repeated examples in Lyons Township of properties that are uncounted or under-assessed in tax rolls:

• A well-known investigative reporter paid just a few thousand in property taxes for years on his $1.9 million house.
• A La Grange house was valued at $56,820, but it sold for $200,000 a few years before. The land was assessed, but not the house.
• Eighteen new townhomes were missing from tax rolls in La Grange.
• A Burr Ridge business paid no property taxes on its building for 13 years. The structure was not assessed.
• A Hinsdale house was sold for $3.9 million, yet its property tax bill was just $17,114. The assessment was based on a smaller house that was leveled years earlier.