Has Anyone Appealed Their Property Taxes?

In lake county it is over a span of 3 years. So, it is typically slow to go up and slow to go down.

To appeal your real estate taxes you have to do it when you get the little card in the mail at the beginning of the year. Contact your township office and they can give you dates for next year.
We protested ours and we did get a reduction but it was not on the house we live in, it was a house we purchased. Our township only gives you about 2 weeks each year to appeal your taxes and townships do not like to advertise when those dates are.
Another thing you have to remember is the appraisal you got from the bank is going to be less than the township appraisal. The reason for this is the bank dose not want to lend you the full value of your house and real estate values have decreased greatly in the last year. The townships appraisal is based on your purchase price, how much you paid for the house. They will only lower it if you can show just cause for them to lower it. I hate to say a bank appraisal will probably not get your taxes lowered because a bank and your local township have different criteria and formulas to come up with figure they give you. But it will not hurt to try next year.

Good Luck,
S.

P.S. I live in McHenry County

We did. You have to file the appeal within 30 days after receiving your assessment from the county. My husband found homes in our area that have recently sold that were comparable to ours or larger that were assessed lower. He did have a hearing with the county and they did end up lowering our assessed value by $40,000! I would definitely try it!

Unless it's something complicated, you don't need an attorney. It's pretty simple paperwork and you just go to the tax assessor's office in your county. I tried to do it in our last home. However, you do have to provide comps and they will ask you point-blank questions as to how many bathrooms, bdrms, fireplaces, square footage, attached/detached structures, etc... of your your home and, eventually, will send someone out to do some measuring, etc... Sometimes, this information is different than what is on your original appraisal and can work against you. Seems basic but.... after the question and answer session - the assessor advised us not to ever try and appeal my taxes because they were already lower than my neighbors (hmmmm...did not know that!)

Home prices are also substantially lower than just a year ago and everyone's appraised value has to be lower. The assessor's office should give you some guidance as to what you need to do.

Good luck.

We've appealed several times. It's a good idea to start with your local assessor's office. The first time we did it ourselves and were denied, second time we used a lawyer and got a huge reduction, third time our township assessor's office helped us to do all the paperwork (for free! I'm in Oak Park) and we got a small reduction. It's complicated because there are 3 different bodies to appeal to in Cook County at different times.

Now that I understand it a little better I will continue to use our free township services or do it myself, and I will appeal at every opportunity, too. But it was definitely, 100% worth it to get the attorney - they worked on contingency and the cost was the first years' savings.

I have appealed a few times and won. You don't need an attorney. You have to remember though that the assessors value is the value from about a year ago, not the value that it is today. In DuPage, the taxes we are about to pay in June of 2009 is for the period of time we lived in the house from January - June of 2008 and the tax bill we just received was the estimate of the assessors fair market value when they re-assessed around September of 2007. You can win by proving one of two things.. that your house is not uniformly assessed (the area you live in has your assessed at 300k where everyone else in the same general area has theirs assessed at 250k) or that the fair market value was off. So from there, you hop on the township assessors website and look at the addresses of houses that are similar to yours (stay within a few block radius) and also hop on the DuPage County Assessors website to compare (DuPage County will show the number that your tax bill does, the assessor will show previous sales). You want to look at the previous sales of similar houses (sq ft) as of March-September of 2007. You can also ask an appraiser to appraise your house as of September-November of 2007 to get a more accurate number.

M.
If your home appraised out less then the assesed values then yes contact the county assessors office to have it redone this way you ar enot paying the taxes on the difference. It is an easy process and to make it easier be sure to have a copy of the appraisal to the assessor to review. The asses values in a neighborhood in accrodance to current home sales..

Good luck
D.

M.
I did appeal I however was denied.
But you do not need a lawyer. Go to www.cookcountyasseror.com
that is assuming you live in Cook County.
There is a spot where you can appeal yourself. It does take a few weeks to get any type of answer. But they also have a tab where you can check on your process.
Now I have heard that with the declining house values they are reasseing taxes & they should be dropping shortly.
Good Luck I hope it turns out better for you then it did for me.
Kris

You can file an initial appeal with the county on your own, but after that it gets pretty hairy, and you'd need an attorney to help you. Our neighborhood appealed at the last assessment a few years ago and it was successful for most of us. We did have an attorney assist after our initial appeal, and his fee was nominal.

HI M.
I am not sure where you live but I live up in lake county and we *tried* to do this last year. Like you, our tax bill estimated our house at $45K MORE than the appraisal. However, our appeal was denied. There was a lot of red tape. They said that our appraisal did not include "appropriate comps" and yet our appraiser did inform us she DID use appropriate comps to our house. It is really a matter of interpretation with the market being so bad. So where the Lake Cty Tax Assessor wanted us to include a house sold in our area - same model but with a full finished basement (including an extra bath and 3 bedrooms) and our basement is NOT finished. So our appraiser did not include that sale as a comp b/c really it is not with the extra square footage/bath/bedrooms etc. So it was a fight between the tax assessor's opinion on what should have been compared and our appraisers choice of comparable houses. Bottom line is our appeal was denied. When I talked to my appraiser about this she told me with the terrible market - EVERYONE is losing money and so the counties are denying more of these appeals now more than ever b/c they county needs their tax money too. It was pure craziness and stress.
So if you do this....good luck!!!

I'm in Kankakee county, and we appealed our property taxes successfully. We had ours assessed when we re-financed, and sent a copy to the county (my hubby did it, so I"m not sure exactly how) but we didn't need a lawer or anything. Of course, the guy who did our assessment for the re-financing was on the board who reviewed the appeal.