By Rockwell Rutter, founder of Ugly House Finder, which scores residential property distress from imagery and public records at county scale.
Quick answer: Cook County property records are published by the Cook County Assessor’s Office at cookcountyassessoril.gov. You can look up a parcel by address or property index number and see assessed value, year built, building characteristics, sales history, and exemption status. What the county record will not tell you is the condition the house is in today, which is the gap Ugly House Finder fills.
Where to look up Cook County property records
Cook County property records are published by the Cook County Assessor’s Office at cookcountyassessoril.gov. A Cook County property search there lets you look a parcel up by address or property index number, and returns assessed value, year built, building characteristics, sales history, and exemption status.
Deeds, mortgages, and liens are held separately by the Cook County Clerk’s Office, so a full picture of a parcel usually means checking both offices.
What the county record shows, and what it leaves out
A Cook County property search answers ownership and value questions well. It will tell you who holds title, what the county thinks the property is worth, when it last sold, and how large the structure is. It will not tell you whether the roof is failing, whether the yard has been left to go wild, whether windows are broken, or whether the house reads as vacant. Assessor data describes a parcel on paper. It does not describe the condition of the house standing on it. That gap is why we built Ugly House Finder: we score visible condition from street-level and aerial imagery, then pair it with the same public records you can pull yourself.
How much of Cook County shows visible distress?
Out of 322 homes we could assess from street-level imagery, 60 showed at least some visible neglect, a rate of 18.6 percent. Because this is a random sample rather than a full count, the true county-wide rate sits within roughly 14.8 to 23.2 percent at 95 percent confidence. Street-level imagery covered 74.9 percent of the sampled properties.
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Homes sampled | 430 |
| Homes scored | 322 |
| Street-level imagery coverage | 74.9% |
| Some visible neglect (2.5 or above) | 18.6% (14.8 to 23.2%) |
| Clear distress (3.5 or above) | 0.3% |
| Average distress score | 2.19 |
Where distress concentrates in Cook County
A county-wide average hides a wide spread. Distress in Cook County is concentrated heavily in the Chicago urban core, in older inner-city neighborhoods, while the outer suburbs run well below the county figure. That is exactly why the whole-county rate above is lower than what you would measure by walking a single distressed neighborhood. A county-wide random sample of a few hundred homes is the right tool for the county headline number, but it spreads too thin to put a precise, trustworthy rate on any one ZIP code. For a block-level read on a specific Chicago neighborhood, the right tool is a targeted scan of that area, which returns an exact count rather than a county-wide average. You can run one yourself in the app in a few minutes.
What the imagery actually found
The scoring model records specific named conditions rather than one opaque number, so the distress can be broken down by what is actually visible.
| Condition | Share of scored homes |
|---|---|
| Overgrown or neglected yard | 24.2% |
| Peeling paint or damaged siding | 26.4% |
| Accumulated debris or trash | 4.0% |
| Roof damage | 3.4% |
| Broken or boarded windows | 6.2% |
| Visible structural damage | 1.6% |
| Reads as abandoned | 0.3% |
The common conditions describe wear rather than crisis. The rarer structural conditions are the ones that separate a genuinely distressed house from a merely tired one, and those are a much shorter and more actionable list.
How we did this
- Sample. A random sample of 430 residential parcels drawn from across Cook County, excluding vacant land and government-owned parcels. This is a sample, not a full census of the county.
- County, not city. These figures describe the entire county, Chicago plus its suburbs. The rate inside the Chicago city core is higher, and affluent outlying areas pull the county-wide average down. The county-wide figure blends both.
- Method. For each property we retrieved street-level imagery aimed at the structure and scored it with our current production vision model against a fixed distress taxonomy derived from our own hand-labeled training set. The model returns named indicators with a severity rating plus a distress score from 0 to 5.
- Thresholds. A score of 3.5 or above is clear distress; 2.5 to 3.5 is visible but milder neglect; below 2.5 is unremarkable.
- Confidence. With 322 scored homes, the county-wide neglect rate carries a 95 percent confidence interval of about plus or minus 5 percentage points. That is reliable for the county as a whole, but too coarse to rank individual neighborhoods, which is why we point you to a targeted neighborhood scan for block-level numbers.
- What is not in here. This scan used street-level imagery alone. It includes no aerial imagery scoring and no tax-delinquency data, both of which our platform can add on request.
- Known error mode. Purely visual scoring can over-call distress where heavy shade or dark facades read as damage. We corroborate a visual-only finding against a second signal before treating any single property as a lead.
Finding properties in poor condition in Cook County
Run your own scan of any Cook County neighborhood, or request a full-county file. Start scanning, or see plans and pricing. For how we measure distress across every market we have studied, read the full research writeup.
Common questions
How do I look up property records in Cook County?
Cook County property records are published by the Cook County Assessor’s Office at cookcountyassessoril.gov. Search by address or property index number to pull a parcel’s record. There is no charge to search.
What information is in a Cook County property record?
A Cook County parcel record typically shows assessed value, year built, building characteristics, sales history, and exemption status. It does not describe the current physical condition of the house.
Can I search Cook County property records by owner name?
Not directly. The Cook County Assessor’s Office indexes parcels by address or property index number, so start from the address if you only have a name.
How do I find properties in poor condition in Cook County?
Public records will not tell you condition. Ugly House Finder scores visible distress from imagery across Cook County and returns a ranked, per-property list. You can run a neighborhood scan yourself or request the full county.
Which Chicago neighborhoods have the most distressed homes?
Distress concentrates in the older inner-city neighborhoods of the Chicago core, and drops off sharply in the outer suburbs. Our county-wide sample gives a reliable figure for the county as a whole, but it is spread too thin to rank individual neighborhoods with confidence. To get an exact, block-level distress read on a specific Chicago neighborhood, run a targeted scan of that area.
How accurate is it?
Accurate enough to rank and prioritize, not to decide on a single address without looking. The model reliably separates a house in poor condition from one in good repair, and it can over-call in unusual lighting, which is why the output is a ranked list to work through rather than a verdict on any one property.