Online Property Information

WHY IT MATTERS

Public documents relating to residential properties provide essential information: who has a legal claim to the property, whether the structure is safe to live in, what taxes are owed, and more. Fortunately, most property documents are already available on public websites. However, finding property documents is burdensome and complicated. In Chicago, a resident must dig through at least six different City and County websites for a complete picture of a property. Furthermore, no website provides legal definitions or explanations of what the documents mean.

A centralized website greatly reduces the time an individual has to spend finding documents. It would also contextualize those documents and empower the decision making of the user, i.e. when a lien appears on the search results, it is accompanied by a definition and explanation of what a lien is. Merely giving a new property owner their deed does not fully equip them to make informed decisions.

Increasing access and transparency has positive impacts on homeowners and renters:

• For homeowners: enables for increased knowledge of their property, protects vulnerable homeowners, protects a primary .source of generational wealth building, empowers people who inherit property
• For renters: landlord vetting is an extremely uncommon practice which leaves tenants more vulnerable to exploitation due to information asymmetry

HOW IT WORKS

The City can address this by building a simple web scraping tool. In theory, any resident would be able to enter a property’s address and see all related documents attached to that property. The tool is essentially a website that searches other websites to find specific pieces of data, and shares this data with the user. This is more technically efficient because you do not need to build a new database, nor do you need to migrate any data over into the new site.

Plus, given the large role the county has in property ownership, the city should cooperate with Cook County in building the web scraper. It would be irresponsible to repeatedly “scrape” county websites without permission. And, omitting the county documents would limit the utility of the website for residents.

The City has two options for building this tool: contract with a vendor, or create the capacity in-house. It is likely that the city would need to hire new staff with the requisite technical skills, but this is likely less expensive in the long run when compared to a third party that bills hourly. However, contracting with a vendor might be faster, as it is the current practice used to digital development.

WHAT'S NEXT

• Liaise with Cook County Clerk, Dept. of Buildings, and Department of Planning and Development to establish partnerships needed to access the databases
• Determine whether the city will hire a vendor or build internal capacity to create this tool and begin RFP/personnel hiring process accordingly
• Connect with a Data Architect to ensure the interoperability of databases between different city and county websites   
• Connect with housing law experts to contextualize the documents