An honest answer, because this is a decision you can reasonably make either way.
You can absolutely file it yourself
Cook County is one of the easier places in the country to self-file. The Assessor takes appeals online, there is no filing fee, and for a straightforward house with an obvious comparison the process is genuinely manageable. If you have the time and your case is clear, doing it yourself costs you nothing but the afternoon.
What the work actually consists of
The filing is the easy part. The case is the evidence: finding properties the county itself treats as comparable to yours, checking that their assessments really are lower once size, age, class and location are accounted for, and presenting that in the form the venue expects. A weak comparable is worse than none — it invites the answer that your assessment is already in line. Most self-filed appeals that go nowhere go nowhere for that reason, not because of a procedural mistake.
When it is worth handing over
- You would be filing at more than one venue. The Assessor and the Board of Review are separate bites, on separate clocks, and the Board hears the case fresh — so a disappointing first answer is not the end of it.
- The property is not a standard house. Multi-unit, mixed-use, commercial and recently improved properties are valued differently, and the comparison is not a matter of finding a similar street.
- You have missed the window. That changes the question entirely — see the Certificate of Error route.
- You simply will not get to it. The single most common reason an over-assessed property stays over-assessed is that nobody filed before the window shut.
How we handle it
Every appeal is run through a valuation model built by Hani Khatib — a property tax attorney and CPA — and any case that falls outside the model is reviewed by him personally.
What it costs
Our fees page sets out the terms in full. Look up your property first — if there is no case to make, we would rather tell you that than file one.