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.
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:
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.
A member requested that they would like a filter in Property Finder to locate corner lots. After a short feasibility investigation we found that it would be possible by locating parcels that are within 40 feet of two differently-named streets.
The "At an intersection or corner lot" filter can be combined with all other filters. We recommend adding – at least for searches in Chicago – a zoning district filter as well as a filter to exclude condos (this will also speed up the search). (If you don't exclude condos then there will be 100s of results in Property Finder that don't represent developable lots.)
How to use the corner lot filter
In the Near West Side community area of Chicago there are 202 corner properties that are zoned to allow multi-family housing.
