Tour an all-electric home, learn about modern buildings & indoor air quality

Coming up on Monday evening, February 19, 2024, in Woodlawn: tour a new construction all-electric rowhouse with Chicago Cityscape founder Steven Vance and electric homes Realtor Wayne Beals. This is your chance to see, feel, hear, and understand what makes an all-electric home more comfortable, safer, and less expensive to operate than traditionally built houses in Chicago.

RSVP on Eventbrite.


Wrapped! But for Chicago building permits

Chicago Cityscape presents its first multimedia Chicago Permits Wrapped , looking at building permit activity in Chicago in 2023. Watch it as a video , sift through the slideshow on our website, download it as a PDF , or read the Wrapped highlights below. Topline figures are that in 2023 the Cit...

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Chicago Cityscape has a workaround for when a property sale wasn't submitted to MyDec

The vast majority of property sales and transactions are required to be submitted – by the sales participants or their agents – to the Illinois Department of Revenue's MyDec database, where Chicago Cityscape sources its Cook County property sales data. 

Occasionally, some transactions are not submitted to MyDec. Chicago Cityscape has a way to warn its members when that may have happened using our new recordings database. 

Currently, Property Reports highlight the date of the last sale (using information provided to MyDec). What's new is that when we have a record of a recording that is of a deed type, Property Report will highlight that fact and advise you to look in the list of recordings for a deed recording that has a price associated with it. 

The screenshot below, of a property that didn't have a MyDec submission, better explains what Chicago Cityscape members should be on the lookout for.


Find property sales that are arms length transactions

Chicago Cityscape added a new filter in Property Finder and Property Sales Browser that filters out sales that are likely not arms length transactions. We are excited to offer this to our members who are brokers and appraisers as this will make it easier to identify incomparable sales. 

To find arms-length transactions we are using most of the filters that the Cook County Assessor's Office uses. Our filter uses the following flags to identify if a property is not arms length:

  • sale price of $10,000 or less
  • uses a quit claim deed, executor deed, or beneficial interest instrument
  • has no instrument type specified
  • has a value for any of nine Line 10 items in the PTAX-203 form

Use the checkbox in Property Finder and Property Sales Browser to exclude property sales that are likely not arms length transactions.

In one of our tests we found that 17 percent of property sales in the Near West Side community area had one or more of the flags and were not considered to be an arms length transaction. 

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