City of Chicago Property Taxes

chicagobride_07

I've been living in my condo for 6 years now.  I just got my first installment bill for 2010, and noticed assessments went up (calculated as 55% of last year's assessment).  This I understand.

Values have been going down in my building.  I also received a notice of proposed assessed valuation from the city (for 2010), and it is at least $40K more than what my place is actually worth (based on sales of comps).  I am looking into appealing this. In the meantime, I went online to determine the total increase to my tax bill if an appeal was rejected.

I used the calculator on the Cook County assessor's website:

http://www.cookcountyassessor.com/estimatedtaxbill.aspx

Using a market value of $380K, I am coming up with an estimated yearly tax bill of over $10,000.

Can someone explain to me if I am using this correctly?  I am asking because I have been paying less than $5K per year over the past 6 years.  This would be over a 50% increase in my taxes.

Hopefully I am missing something?

TIA

morgie44

I am a little late on this, but are you using the 5500 for your homeowners exemption?  If so, you might want to double check that because I am guessing it is more than 5500 that is in the example, if you have been in your house for 6+ years.  You can find out what your actual amount is by looking up your specific house and then clicking on exemptions. 

Mabmin

I don't have my current tax bill with me, but I looked at an old tax bill.  It appears that you don't use the actual market value to calculate the taxes.  The calculation on my tax bill shows that the market value is $244,569 when in reality the market value is well over that.  It also shows that my assessment level was 16%, not 10%.  I think the example on the website is trying to break it down to show how it is calculated, but isn't using actual numbers.  My condo association is appealing our taxes.  We lost the first round and are now appealing that decision.