Chicago Houses Sold in 2025 for More Than Their Valuations Implied. In West Englewood, Nearly Twice as Much.
We matched 11,854 arms-length 2025 Chicago house sales to their tax-year-2025 valuations. The citywide median valuation implies 81% of what buyers paid; the gap is widest on the South Side, where the 2027 reassessment has the most ground to remeasure.
Chicago houses that sold in 2025 carried official valuations that implied, at the median, 81 percent of what their buyers actually paid. On the Near North Side the two numbers nearly match. In West Englewood, the median house sold for almost twice its implied valuation.
11,854 sales matched to their tax-year-2025 valuations, 11,719 of them mappable to a community area · houses only
An assessment is the Cook County Assessor’s valuation of a property, and it is the number a tax bill’s share is computed from. For houses the county assesses at 10 percent of estimated market value. We took every arms-length Chicago house sale of 2025 — 11,854 of them — and compared each sale price with the same house’s valuation for the 2025 tax year, before any appeal touched it. Multiplying by ten gives an implied market value for comparison, not a price the office ever quoted. A ratio of 100 percent means that implied value matched the buyer’s price. Across the 11,719 sales that map to a community area, the median is 81 percent: valuations run behind the 2025 market. How far behind depends a great deal on where the house is.
Where valuations track prices, and where they trail them Chicago’s 77 official community areas. Grey areas had fewer than 50 usable house sales in 2025, too few for a fair median. 135 sales without a mappable location are excluded from the area figures.
The areas valued closest to their prices, and the areas furthest below
Valued closest to their sale pricesshare of price
Near North Side88 sales99.4%
Hyde Park52 sales97.5%
Near West Side90 sales89.1%
North Park66 sales88.5%
Grand Boulevard57 sales88.2%
Valued furthest below their sale pricesshare of price
South Deering108 sales64.9%
Englewood204 sales64.4%
Pullman55 sales64.0%
Hegewisch78 sales60.4%
West Englewood272 sales57.5%
The pattern lines up with where prices have moved fastest. Our recorded-sales reporting found South and West Side house prices rising from a low base at some of the fastest rates in the city — Englewood’s median recorded house price, about $25,000 in 2019, reached about $120,000 by 2025 — and assessments are updated on a schedule: Chicago was last reassessed for tax year 2024, so the 2025 valuations mostly reflect the market as the Assessor measured it then. Where prices kept climbing after that measurement, the valuation fell behind the price. West Englewood’s median 2025 buyer paid almost twice the house’s implied valuation; buyers on the Near North Side paid almost exactly the implied value.
What a below-market valuation means at the next reassessment
Within a taxing district, tax shares are relative: a house’s slice of the levy follows its equalized assessed value, after exemptions, against everyone else’s. Before those adjustments enter, a house valued at half its market price starts from a smaller share than a same-priced house valued in full. Chicago’s next citywide reassessment is scheduled for tax year 2027, and reassessment means remeasuring values against recent sales. If prices in the widest-gap areas hold anywhere near their 2025 levels, those are the valuations with the most ground to make up when that remeasurement comes. What any of it does to an individual bill is genuinely unknowable from here — levies, exemptions, equalization, appeals and everyone else’s new values all move at once — and this page makes no bill prediction. It measures the size of the gap the next reassessment will be looking at.
One more piece of context sits beside this map. Our appeal-map reporting found that owners in West Englewood file the fewest assessment appeals per house in the city, and that the appeals they do file win at the city’s highest rate. This page adds a third fact: its valuations sit furthest below its own market. We present the three facts side by side and draw no causal line among them; each is measured independently from county records.
How we counted
Sales: the Assessor’s Parcel Sales file (wvhk-k5uv), calendar-2025 sales in Chicago’s eight townships, houses only (classes 2xx, excluding condominiums), keeping only sales the file itself marks arms-length: no duplicate recording of the same sale within 365 days, no sales under $10,000, no excluded deed types, no multi-parcel sales. A parcel genuinely sold twice in 2025 passes those screens as two transactions; 447 rows are such second sales, each counted as its own observation of a price against the same valuation.
Valuations: the Assessor’s Assessed Values file (uzyt-m557), tax-year-2025 mailed values — the Assessor’s original figure for each parcel, before any appeal. Every one of the 11,407 sold parcels matched a mailed value. Using pre-appeal values keeps this measurement independent of the appeal behavior we mapped separately.
The ratio: ten times the mailed assessed value, divided by the sale price, per the county’s 10 percent assessment level for houses; each area’s figure is the median across its sales, shown only where an area had at least 50 usable sales. The citywide median is computed across the 11,719 sales that map to a community area; 135 without a mappable location are excluded throughout.
What the timing means: Chicago’s most recent citywide reassessment was for tax year 2024, so tax-year-2025 mailed values largely carry that measurement forward, while the sales here run through calendar 2025. The gap measured is the one a 2025 buyer actually experienced between price and valuation; it is not a grade of the Assessor’s accuracy as of the earlier date the office was valuing for.
As of: both files were retrieved July 27, 2026. The sales file continues to add late-recorded 2025 deeds over time and can be corrected, so a later rerun may show different counts; the committed data snapshot in our repository preserves the exact figures used here.
What this is not: a tax bill prediction. Bills depend on levies, exemptions, the state equalization multiplier and everyone else’s values; this page measures valuations against prices and nothing further.
Computed by KCM Desk from Assessor sales and valuation records; published July 27, 2026. If you spot an error, corrections come first.
