We published two enhancements to our existing Property Sales section, and it's live for both Place Snapshots (areas) and Address Snapshots (addresses and parcels). Our Property Sales data is based on all transactions reported to the Illinois Department of Revenue per the Real Estate Transfer Tax filing rules. This means we have all residential, commercial, and industrial transactions in one place, while most other real estate platforms focus on a single sector. 

The first enhancement shows summary statistics for all of the property sales in view: the average and the median sale price. Change the filters or show more sales at a time and the two stats will update instantly. 

Screenshot caption: At the bottom of the Property Sales table are the average and median summary statistics. For this particular Address Snapshot, the median sale price for all properties within 250 feet from January to March 2021 was $445,000 (for properties with a sale price greater than $0).

The second enhancement counts the number of property sales for each buyer and seller in a Place Snapshot or within 1/2 mile of an Address Snapshot. This way you can see who's buying and selling the most properties. Not only can this be used to find potential buyers and sellers of your own properties, it's also a way for people to monitor potentially predatory real estate practices in their neighborhoods.   

Screenshot caption: When you load Property Sales, there's a new Property Sales summary table below it that shows the names of buyers and sellers in the selected period. For this particular Place Snapshot, there were 1,031 buyers and sellers who bought and sold 555 properties in the Albany Park community area in 2020.

We've made some improvements to Address Snapshots on Chicago Cityscape, as well as the "additional snapshots" that come with membership. These changes are also available to anyone who's purchased an Address Snapshot à la carte. This is another example of how we're constantly improving the value of our service. 

Changes within Address Snapshot include (changes apply to Chicago properties only unless otherwise noted): 

1. Whether the property is eligible to have an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU)
2. Whether property has unused zoning capacity and could add housing without a zoning change
3. Chicago's 2021 updates to the Affordable Requirements Ordinance are now part of Zoning Assessment
4. Fair Market Rents (as calculated by HUD) for the local ZIP Code (applies in all of Illinois)
5. Whether the property is in one of the new "predominance of the block" areas near the 606/Bloomingdale Trail and in part of Pilsen
6. Property sales data has been updated through March 30, 2021 (applies in all of Cook County)

Changes in the "additional snapshots":

1. Environmental Snapshot: Energy usage data for buildings required to participate now has 2019 data, and shows new data (water usage, Chicago energy rating, and Energy Star score). 
2. Land Use Snapshot: Minor improvements here in speed and design.
3. Transportation Snapshot: Major improvements, to show all nearby transit options, Divvy bike stations, and links to analysis about the frequency of service at each transit stop. Plus, information about where people who live nearby go to work, and where people who work nearby go home after work. 
4. Lending & Investment Snapshot: We added new demographics (including income) as well as maps of three publicly-funded project categories (TIF, SBIF, and NOF). 

When you re-load the Address Snapshot you purchased, look for the "additional snapshots" section. Find your purchases here.

If you want continuous access to this information about any property in Chicago and Cook County, consider subscribing to a Cityscape Real Estate Pro membership. Use coupon code kezLeXsx to save 10% for new memberships for up to 12 months. 

City Council adopted revisions to the ARO, or Affordable Requirements Ordinance, a law that mandates housing developers set aside some of their units and rent them affordably. It does away with pilot areas and organizes the city into 5 geographies, which are now on Cityscape.

Read a summary of the changes on Elrod Friedman's (a law firm) website

We've annotated the screenshot below to highlight these changes.

Look up ARO information with Address Snapshot, scroll down to "Zoning Assessment" and click the "Expand ARO" button (the next screenshot shows what that looks like).

The map below shows the five geographies. 

We updated our Amenities & Social infrastructure database today with nearly 400 additional locations representing our selected categories. 

New locations

This update included 193 locations obtained from OpenStreetMap – 90 additional restaurants, 13 non-profit offices, 65 convenience stores, 24 banks, 21 health clinics, 7 supermarkets and more. 

Secondly, we added 192 federally-qualified health centers in Cook County. We added this based on a suggestion from a member who needed to know where these were in relation to the properties they acquire for long-term affordable housing. 

Thirdly, we updated the Chicago Public Schools locations, removing four schools that CPS closed on July 1, 2020 (Frazier ES, Chicago Virtual ES/HS, Foundations MS/HS, and Hope HS).

While Google Maps has the largest database of places in Chicagoland, only ours can be filtered by area (useful for doing market analysis, creating listing brochures, and assessing the value of a property) and downloaded. Our map will also summarize and count the number of locations in each category. 

It can always improve so send your suggestions for new businesses or locations that are closed and need to be removed. 

What else is in the overhaul?

As for that overhaul promised in the headline, we made two big changes:

1. All locations show related icons - a coffee mug for a café or bakery, a heartbeat for a health clinic, and fries for a fast food restaurant (see the screenshot below). 
2. Amenities & Social infrastructure is integrated in 100% of our Place Snapshots and every Personal Place that you draw yourself. The screenshot of Little Village below shows 318 locations, including 124 restaurants!

People use Demolitions Tracker to know what buildings in Chicago are scheduled for demolition, and to see how many demolition permits have been issued each year. 

We've made three changes to improve both use cases!

• Like our main Building Permits Browser, the Demolitions Tracker map and table are now side by side for easier viewing. 

Screenshot: The map and data table are now side by side. This particular demolition permit is by Metra to make room for a new train station and parking lot in Auburn Gresham.

• Filter the demolition permits by time period, including a set number of days, or a specific year. 
• Charts are improved: See four years at once, download the data, and they're bigger.

Last April, we added environmental *inspections* data for Chicago addresses, and we promised that the *permits* data would be added within a week. The goal was to help environmental justice organizations and residents understand what point source air pollution they could expect in their neighborhood. 

Additionally, adding the environmental data was a response to the disastrous implosion of the smoke stack at the former Crawford generating station so that people could be alerted through the Address Snapshot notifications. 

Looking up environmental inspections and environmental permits is a two-step process:

1. First, look up an Address Snapshot by searching for any address or PIN in Chicago.
2. Then, scroll down and click on "Environmental Snapshot". A new tab will open where you can see environmental-oriented data about and around the location you looked up.

We've updated our Places database to show the expanded boundaries of the following Special Service Areas (Chicago's name for business improvement districts):

• 19, Howard Street
• 21, Lincoln Square
• 22, Andersonville, Clark Street
• 24, Rogers Park, Clark Street
• 28, Six Corners
• 44, Beverly
• 45, 103rd/Halsted
• 48, Old Town
• 72, Austin Village (new)
• 73, Chinatown (new)

Additionally, SSAs 40 (Michigan Ave-Roseland) and 41 (103rd St-Roseland) were combined into new SSA 71 (Roseland). The maps for SSA 40 and SSA 41 were marked as "dissolved". 

Several SSA managers (which are often Chambers of Commerce) use Chicago Cityscape to find new businesses in their districts, and keep a list of property owners. If you're interested, contact us for a demonstration.

This also updates the data for Incentives Checker.

We designed Proposed Projects earlier this year to help lead gen leaders in Chicago (business development, sales, account managers) fine tune their sales funnel and paring back information to get to the core: What is the project scope, what is its timing, and who's building it. 

We've made two changes that do a better job of that core idea:

1. The Proposed Project details page tells you the project's current stage 
2. The same details page says whether permits have been issued

These two changes are important for all lead gen leaders because different businesses are looking to connect with the project builders at different stages. Some are ready to contact the proposer as soon as an application has been filed with City Hall, others can wait until it's approved, while still others don't need to contact anyone until after a building permit has been issued and the building is under construction. 

This screenshot shows the updated Proposed Projects details page – look at "Stages of Proposed Projects" at the bottom. This particular project's zoning change application was approved by City Hall on February 19, 2020, and the necessary renovation permit was approved on April 8, 2020.

This has been a top-requested feature for years: Show how many dwelling units were permitted in a given place in a given timeframe. 

Now, Chicago Cityscape shows that information, and here are three examples of how you can use it.

1. Count the number of new dwelling units permitted in a specific period of time

Say, new construction permits issued in November 2020 so far. The answer is shown below the permits table. Make sure you choose to show more than 10 permits at a time.

The answer? Approximately 501 units in 17 multi-unit buildings and 30 single-unit houses.

How to use it:

• Visit Building Permits Browser.
• click on the Filter permits button
• select the New construction checkbox
• click the Apply filters button
• scroll up to see the updated table and the updated summary in bold text immediately below the table

2. Compare residential permit activity in two Personal Places

(This example works in any of our 37,000+ predefined Places, but it's easy to draw a custom analysis area using the Personal Places tool.)

I drew two Personal Places: One covering part of the West Loop, and another covering part of River North. In just a couple of minutes, after adjusting the filters for the year 2020 and the "new construction" permit type, I can see the following data:

• West Loop Personal Place: 1,086 units in 7 multi-units (out of 38 total new construction permits)
• River North Personal Place: 396 units in 3 multi-unit (out of 22 total new construction permits)

3. Find the biggest residential building permitted in 2020. 

Open up the Building Permits Browser, choose the "New construction" filter, and then sort the table by the number of units (click on the column title to switch the ordering direction). 

You'll see the biggest new construction residential project this year is for Onni's 32-story high-rise next to K2.

Note that this feature is not 100% accurate. We weren't able to show it before because the City of Chicago data source doesn't publish that piece of information, even though it is collected on the permit application.

Instead, our software reads each building permit description and looks for keywords. There is no standard way to write out numbers or scope, so we did our best writing software that locates words like "3 d.u." and "single-family" or "SFH". 

Chicago Cityscape last integrated the Chicago zoning map in July 2020. We update it every two months, which would put the next update in October 2020. (It's three months by the calendar, but two months considering that City Council doesn't meet in August.)

Since then, 25 changes were made, comprising new planned developments and splitting some zoning districts into two different ones. That means Chicago is now divided into 13,635 distinct zoning districts 

The map shows the 25 new zoning districts created from existing zoning districts (in green).

Although Chicago has only 81 zoning classifications, plus the "PD" zoning classification, for planned developments, these are widely scattered across the city and in non-contiguous areas. For example, there are several swaths of RS-3 zoning districts (a zoning classification that allows only single-unit houses) with "spot" zoning districts within them, for RT-4, RM-5, and some others. 

These two additional zoning districts allow multi-unit housing and are necessary either because the RS-3 was applied to existing multi-unit housing, preventing permitted renovations, or to allow a new multi-unit house to be built.

Every time you look up an Address Snapshot in Chicago you'll get a Zoning Assessment; the date of the most recent zoning map update is always shown, and you can click a button to get a limited look back at past zoning districts for that property.

Are you looking for the right place to locate a building or business, but don't know what zoning classifications allow it or where the right zoning districts are? Use our Site Selector tool.