Appealing Property Taxes?

[Nicholas Layton]

I haven't seen much discussed about property taxes, and maybe it's just a concern to me because of where I live. Cook/Will counties in Illinois of some of the highest property tax rates in the country, the property taxes are usually the biggest thing that make most deals really bad that I've analyzed. I see Brandon doing a live analysis on properties that have like $967 property taxes annually. That's insane to me. I've never seen anything lower than $2000 and everything that is in the $2000's is always the upper 2000's. Close to triple what I'm seeing him find.

I don't know how property taxes are done in the rest of the country, but here, the system is intentionally designed to over assess people's houses to either a) make them pay more, or b) make them higher a tax attorney to get their taxes lowered. "A" obviously means more money for the county so that's why they do that. But why would they do "B"? Because the assessor takes campaign contributions from tax attorneys (google Joseph Berrios, I'm glad he's gone now).

I've seen zero discussion about property taxes so I was wondering, what do people do about this? Do you just accept what the county wants you to pay? Do you fight it? How often do you try to fight it? How much time, energy, and money is spent trying to get your property taxes corrected? Is this only a problem in a few counties around the country or is this a common practice everywhere?

I just sold a 2 bed room, 1.5 bath, 1,100 sqft condo that I lived in for 2 years, I bought it for $85,000 and my property taxes were over $4,200.