Cook County Tax Exemption treatment on flip

[Joe Ramirez]

Hi all,

I recently completed my first flip and had a question about the treatment of tax exemptions on the property.  In the end, I feel like I significantly overpaid.

We purchased the property in late September of 2017 from an elderly couple that had 3 exemptions (homeowner, senior and senior freeze).  On closing, we received about $1700 in credits towards the 2017 tax bill.  Their previous full year tax bills averaged about $2100, so this makes sense to me.

Unfortunately, we held the property for almost exactly 1 year, til late September 2018.  In that timeframe, we paid the first 2017 bill of only about $1100 (thus still reflecting the exemptions). But the final 2017 bill did NOT reflect any exemptions, so we ended up paying an additional $5800 for a total of $6900 to the county for year 2017.

Finally, when we went to sell the property, we had to give a credit to the seller based on the 2017 bill.  We credited $5500.  So we held the property for a year, but ended up paying $6900 - $1700 + $5500 = $10,700.... which seems to be almost $3000 more than what we should have paid for 1 year of ownership.

I feel like the county should have received ~80% of the 2017 bill with exemptions and ~20% of the bill without exemptions, yet they received a full year without exemptions.  Am I wrong or is this not how it works?   Is there anything I could do to appeal or is it too late now that I don't own the property? It seem like this must happen somewhat regularly, so I'm surprised there was no automated way to catch it.

Thanks in advance for any advice!