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This doesn't happen very often—at least not in the fractious times in which we live—but the ongoing argument between downtown landlords and Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi over commercial property tax assessments is a case where the two parties in the debate are both right.
To put it simply, Kaegi is correct to raise assessments, but landlords are certainly right to worry about the impact, especially in light of the city's still tenuous recovery from the pandemic-era disruption of the downtown office market.
In this week's issue, Crain's Alby Gallun analyzes 35 large office, apartment, hotel and retail properties in Chicago and finds that landlords' consistent refrain—that Kaegi is unfairly targeting them with big assessment hikes—doesn't quite match with reality. Gallun's number crunching shows that for this cross-section of the downtown market, the assessor's office underestimated their values when compared with appraisals of the buildings performed since the beginning of 2018.
Just as a for-instance, Kaegi's office recently valued the AMA Plaza office tower in River North at $483.4 million. An appraiser working for the property's lender valued it in June...