* 11/18/25 - Crains - Cook County has a new home price tracker. Here's how it stacks up........................
Buzz Sawyer
Thursday, November 13, 2025
Cook County has a new home price tracker. Here's how it stacks up.
The Cook County Assessor launched a new home price tracking tool, joining a field already crowded with commercial players such as Zillow and Redfin.
The Housing Market Tracker, located on the assessor's website, is "a way to see what's going on with home prices in your community or your municipality," Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi told Crain's.
In his office's triennial reassessment of every Cook County property, Kaegi said, "it's our job to estimate where the market is, (and) now you can see what we're seeing."
The most recent reassessment led to the median residential tax bill in the city rising this year by 16.7% to $4,457, according to an analysis by Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas released yesterday. The increase was the biggest residential property tax hike in at least 30 years, a shift in the tax burden that was driven largely by the decimation of commercial property values in Chicago's urban core during the 2020s.
The idea behind the new price tracker is that when investigating their property's assessment — a storied tradition in Cook County, where property assessments are dinner-table talk — homeowners could use the tool in conjunction with other pages on the assessor's site to "get the context," Kaegi said.
The other pages include the Home Value Report, where residents can look up the factors that went into their property's assessment, and the page where they can find comparable properties to see how their assessments stack up.
Kaegi suggested there's more utility than just that. The tracker shows how the median price of homes sold in any individual Cook County suburb or any of the 77 community areas in Chicago have changed yearly between 2020 and 2024.
"You might do research on neighborhoods," Kaegi said, "to see what's the median value of homes in the neighborhood and where you would be able to afford to buy a home."
For that, the site will have to pry house hunters' eyes away from the price-tracking tools that already exist on commercial sites Zillow, Realtor.com, Redfin and Homes.com, among others, all of which offer information on median prices broken out locally.
The Cook County Assessor's site shows the median price of single-family homes in Lincoln Park growing from $1.2 million in 2020 to a little under $1.52 million in 2024. That's good to know, but how does using the assessor's site compare with using the commercial sites?
Using Lincoln Park as an example, Crain's compared the assessor's site with Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com and Homes.com on five attributes.
Each packages the data differently with a different visual display, but generally with the same outcome, since they're mostly working with the same data. Kaegi's data is drawn from the property tax transfer declarations filed with the state of Illinois for every property transaction. The commercial sites have pipelines from state and county property records and multiple-listing services. They should have largely the same data set, capturing both properties sold on the open market and those sold privately, not through real estate agents.
Here's how the sites compare:
• The median price of homes sold — the middle price on a list from highest-priced to lowest-priced — is a common yardstick used to measure home prices.
Redfin (and others) track median prices by month, while the assessor tracks it by year, providing a more cogent picture of how prices have moved.
That's particularly true in places where few homes sell in any given month, which allows any single sale to move the median price more than in a pool of hundreds or thousands of sales.
On this point, the assessor's site has the advantage.
• Realtor.com makes it difficult to break out property types, such as condos and single-family homes. The two markets can be quite different from one another in city neighborhoods with a mix of types.
In Lincoln Park, according to the assessor's site, the median price for single-family homes was nearly $1.12 million in 2024, more than twice the median price of condos, $550,000.
The two types of housing would be available to households with very different incomes. Realtor.com provides a figure that mixes both types of housing, with a median sale price of about $792,000.
Like the assessor's site, Redfin and Zillow also separate out the housing types. On this point, these sites have the advantage over Realtor.com.
• On Realtor.com and Redfin, there's data on such market attributes as what percentage of homes sell for more than the asking price, a crucial thing to know when budgeting for a home purchase. If you can afford an $800,000 house, should you be shopping for those that are priced below or above that figure? The commercial sites (with the exception of Homes.com) offer this information, but it's not available from the assessor's site.
• The commercial sites offer to connect users with agents in the area they're searching, though with different degrees of subtlety. Homes.com offers name, photo and contact information on six agents who identified Lincoln Park as their specialty, while Zillow simply offers a button users can click to "talk to a local agent."
Because the assessor's site is a public service, it clearly can't offer connections to agents. Still, it's information many potential buyers or sellers would hope to find easily.
• Whether for price research or out of sheer nosiness, searching for the sale prices of friends' and neighbors' homes has become a popular pastime since the real estate market moved onto the internet.
On the assessor's price tracker, clicking on the name of a neighborhood or suburb brings up a map with an icon for every property that has sold since 2020. Scrolling across the map reveals what each one went for at its most recent sale.
The commercial sites all offer the same, but for timeframes of different lengths. On Realtor.com and Homes.com, it's just the past year, while Redfin offers data for the past five years, like the assessor's site.
The overall assessment: the assessor's site is a worthy competitor in the already busy game of helping home buyers and sellers puzzle through what a home might be worth on the market — and where they can afford to buy.
Dennis Rodkin is a senior reporter covering residential real estate for Crain’s Chicago Business. He joined Crain’s in 2014 and has been covering real estate in Chicago since 1991.