Absentee & out-of-state owners
Where don’t property owners live at the property they own — and how far away are they? Switch between the share of parcels that aren’t owner-occupied and, among those, the share mailed outside Illinois. Click any area to see its largest absentee owners. Looking only at homes? See owner-occupancy for residential parcels.
How to read this map
Not owner-occupied compares two addresses the Cook County Assessor publishes for the same parcel — where the owner gets mail, and where the property is. Cook publishes no owner-occupancy flag, so this is a derived signal rather than an official determination; the owner-occupancy map explains the method and its limits in full. This view counts every parcel, not just homes.
Out-of-state is deliberately scoped to absentee parcels only. A raw out-of-state mailing test is badly inflated by mortgage-servicer hubs — plenty of owner-occupied homes mail their tax bill to an escrow servicer in another state, and counting those would say nothing about who lives in Chicago. The state is read from the Assessor’s own structured mailing-state field.
The drawer lists an area’s largest absentee owners by parcel count. These are counts as published, nothing more: a large holding may be a housing non-profit, a public agency, a receiver, or an investor, and the data does not distinguish between them.
Source: Cook County Assessor owner and parcel addresses, resolved to the 77 community areas. See methodology for the mailing-address method and its coverage.