Guides for anyone relocating to Chicago or its suburbs: what homes cost, how buying works here, and the practical questions every move raises. Researched from local data and sources, and updated as the answers change.
HUD publishes a two-bedroom rent figure for every Chicago ZIP - the schedule Section 8 payment standards are built from. The median is up 46 percent since 2019, the floor is in Back of the Yards, and fourteen ZIPs share a $2,670 ceiling set by a verified federal cap.
The Cook County Assessor valued the Chicago houses and two-to-six-flats that sold in 2025 at 81 percent of their sale prices, at the median, and the homes resold within two years at 60 percent. Every community area’s figure, with resales set apart. Second reading, September 30, 2026, with corrections to the July version.
Chicago’s deed and permit records for January through April 2026: median prices 18 to 29 percent above the same months of 2023, the low of the last five years, in all three types of home, and new-construction permits at a five-year high. In July we printed a 22 percent rise in sales; after the county added 1,914 sales to 2025, the same comparison reads 6 percent down. Both readings are shown, next to the national figures and the margins printed beside them. Corrected September 30, 2026.
Chicago's assessment roll opened at $49.46 billion and closed $3.85 billion lighter. Commercial property holds 39 percent of the city's assessed value and collected 86 percent of the reductions. Against its own value it was cut 17.0 percent; residential 1.3. Why that is not the whole story.
We read every Cook County Board of Review decision on a Chicago house for the 2025 tax year. Appeals filed without an attorney won 59.5% of the time; appeals filed with one won 38.9%. The gap holds in every price bracket and all five years we checked.
We put the federal mortgage record next to Cook County’s deed record for 2025. At least 1,532 homes sold at or under $100,000; lenders wrote 289 purchase mortgages that size in the whole city. In West Englewood, 124 such homes sold and four small purchase mortgages were written. Corrected September 30, 2026: the first count was incomplete and included parking spaces.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (Public Law 119-101) became law on July 11, 2026 without the president’s signature. We set four parts of it against the county’s deed file, the federal mortgage record, the city’s permit file and its inspection record. The small-mortgage sections match Chicago’s records most closely; the deed record can say little about the investor ban. Corrected September 30, 2026, against the enacted text.
Companies bought 13 percent of the Chicago homes sold from 2018 through 2022 and 46 percent of the ones resold by their buyers within two years. The buyer names on 245,849 recorded sales, sorted: single-building condominium buyouts, house-by-house buyers, a nonprofit receiver and a relocation firm. Recomputed September 30, 2026, with five corrections to the July version.
Cook County’s tax rolls show 7,875 fewer two-to-six-flats in Chicago than in 2006. Of the 13,049 parcels that left the count, 6,208 are now classed as single-family houses, 2,729 as vacant land, and 2,084 were retired with condominium units recorded within 12 meters of the same spot. In higher-priced areas most are now houses; in lower-priced areas most are vacant land. Recomputed September 30, 2026, with corrections to the July version.
We joined every market sale recorded by the Cook County Assessor since 2018 to Chicago’s 77 community areas: what buyers actually paid, by area and by type of home, with a map you can scrub through the years. Recomputed September 30, 2026, after the county added 5,502 sales to 2025, and with parking spaces and storage units taken out of the condo figures.
