Looking to Appeal Your Taxes?

Looking for an easy way to save money this year? Consider appealing your property taxes! Most property owners who appeal are successful and have their taxes lowered. If you don't appeal your property taxes you'll end up paying more than your fair share as you'll be paying extra to make up for all of the people who did appeal and had their tax bill lowered. I do not recommend appealing the taxes yourself as the success rate for people who appeal their own taxes is very poor whereas it's very high if you have an attorney appeal the taxes for you.

It doesn't cost you anything to talk to an attorney or to appeal; you only pay the attorney IF you win the appeal. If you do win the appeal most tax appeal attorneys charge you about 1/3 of your first year's tax savings as their fee. Therefore, if the real estate attorney saves you $600 per year in taxes you would only pay a fee of about $200 so you still come out saving $400. And that $600 savings will apply to each year for approximately 3 years until the next reassessment year so really you're saving about $1800 total.

The real estate tax attorney I recommend has an 80% success rate and typically saves clients a few hundred dollars to over $1,000 per year depending on the size of your tax bill. Also the real estate attorney does pretty much all of the work; you just have to fill out a few forms.

Of course, the city of Chicago likes to make this process as confusing as possible. Therefore, while you get a tax bill two times per year, that's NOT when you can appeal your property taxes. Instead, there is a very limited window of time when you can appeal your property taxes and that window of time varies depending on what neighborhood you live in. This is why, if you feel your taxes are high compared to your neighbors, I recommend consulting with a tax appeal attorney to find out if 1. if the attorney thinks it is worthwhile to appeal your taxes and 2. when you're allowed to appeal them based on your address.

If you live in a fee simple townhouse or a single family house, you can simply hire a property tax appeal attorney without issue. However, if you live in a condo building then the HOA needs to hire one attorney to represent the whole building and that attorney would appeal the taxes for all of the units in the building at one time. You cannot appeal as an individual owner when you live in a condo building. Regardless of what type of property you live in we recommend appealing your property taxes every year unless you recently bought in the past year or so and your current assessed value of your home is less than the purchase price you paid for your home.

Here's more information on why you want to consider appealing your taxes and how you do it: how-to-appeal-your-property-taxes.

If you want to appeal your property taxes we recommend one of the following tax appeal attorney's:

Keith Fenceroy JD/MBA
KeithFenceroyLaw@gmail.com 
FENCEROY LAW, LLC
3047 N Lincoln Ave, Suite 400
Chicago, IL 60657
PH (773) 654-2404
Cell (773) 209-9515
FX (773) 857-1633
CHECK US OUT ON YELP: http://www.yelp.com/biz/fenceroy-law-office-chicago 

OR

Danielle Pearlman; dpearlman@sarnoffpropertytax.com; (312) 448-5352