Prairie Assessment Group proved unequal assessment in 3 minutes and won an 18% reduction at the Cook County Board of Review

The challenge

Prairie Assessment Group handles Class 5a commercial and Class 5b industrial appeals for owners in Chicago and the suburbs. Cook County reassesses on a three-year rotation by township, so every filing window arrives with a new set of assessments, a narrow deadline set by the Board of Review for that township, and hundreds of comparable properties to sort through. The firm's consultants built uniformity briefs by exporting Assessor data to spreadsheets, hand-selecting comparables, and calculating assessed value per square foot at the 25% commercial level for each one.

That work was slow, and it was hard to defend. A Board of Review analyst can discard a comparable in seconds if the class, age or location does not match, and a brief with a weak set of comps often ends in a small, negotiated reduction. Prairie wanted a repeatable way to select defensible comparables and show the arithmetic behind the median.

The approach

The senior consultant ran Lakeshore Commons, a 96,000 sq ft Class 5a neighborhood retail center assessed at $3,900,000 (an implied market value of $15,600,000, or $162.50 per sq ft at the 25% level), through Equity Uniformity. The matrix selected comparable Class 5a retail centers in the same assessment neighborhood, adjusted for size, age and condition, and reported a median adjusted assessed value per square foot well below the subject's. It took 3 minutes, and the consultant could see which comps drove the median and swap any she disagreed with.

Income Valuation added the owner's normalized operating statement as a second line of evidence, and Petition Generator assembled the Board of Review submission. The Board granted an 18% reduction, taking the assessment from $3,900,000 to $3,198,000 (an implied market value of $12,792,000, or $133.25 per sq ft). That is a $702,000 drop in assessed value, which at a 3.0 equalization factor and a 7.0% composite tax rate is about $147,000 less tax every year. Prairie now runs the matrix on every parcel before deciding whether to file.