MyDec — Cook County sales
MyDec — Cook County sales
Every property sale in Illinois is filed with the Department of Revenue on a form called a PTAX-203, and every one of those filings is public the week it is recorded. That is MyDec, and it is the earliest public record of a sale there is — months ahead of the assessor's sales file, and ahead of what any subscription data provider will show you.
Turn it on and Everre pulls the Cook County apartment-building sales every morning. Each one becomes:
- A property, if you do not already have it.
- A sale on that property — price, buyer, seller, the date it was recorded and the date the deed was signed.
- A new current owner, with the previous owner kept as history.
Turning it on
Go to Settings → Integrations → MyDec. Check the filter, then press Turn on MyDec. There is nothing to sign in to — MyDec is public data.
It runs once a day from then on. Pull now runs it immediately.
What it pulls
The filter is the building class, not the price.
The declaration asks the filer what the property is, and answers it with a letter code. Two of those are apartment buildings:
| Code | What it means |
|---|---|
| D | Apartment building, 6 units or fewer |
| E | Apartment building, over 6 units |
Both are on by default, and that is the whole multifamily filter. It is a far better test than a price threshold: a threshold sweeps in every expensive single-family house in the city and drops every small building that trades below it.
You can narrow it further:
- Cities — leave empty for the whole county, or list the ones you work.
- Minimum units — the filer's own count. Blank on about 2% of filings, and a minimum drops those along with the small ones, so the building-class filter above is the safer way to narrow by size.
- Minimum price — a $0 declaration is usually an estate settling or a transfer between related entities rather than a market sale.
- Rolling window — how many days back each run looks. Seven by default. Overlap costs nothing, so there is no reason to cut it fine.
- Runs daily at — the hour the feed pulls, in your own time zone. 6:00 AM by default. It is a fixed time, so it does not drift later each day.
Preview shows you what a filter would pick up without writing anything. Change the filter, preview, then save.
When it runs
Once a day, at the hour set on the settings screen — 6:00 AM by default, so the morning's filings are waiting when you start.
Each run looks back seven days rather than one. Declarations reach the recorder days after a closing and the state refreshes weekly, so a single-day window would miss most of them. Re-reading the same week costs nothing: sales are matched on the declaration's own id, so anything already recorded is recognised and skipped. It also means a missed day repairs itself — if a run fails, the next one still covers the period.
Pull now runs it immediately whenever you want it.
Why a price sometimes needs explaining
Not every recorded price is what a building is worth, and the declaration says so if you know where to look. Everre reads those answers and puts them on the sale as badges.
| Badge | What it means |
|---|---|
| Partial interest | Only a share of the property changed hands. The price bought a fraction, not the asset. |
| Related party | A sale between relatives or affiliated companies. |
| Bank REO | The lender owned it and was selling. |
| Court ordered, Auction, Short sale, Deed in lieu | Forced or distressed circumstances. |
| Sale-leaseback | The seller stayed on as tenant. |
| n parcels | The price covers more than one parcel, so price per unit cannot be worked out from this sale alone. |
| A deed type | Shown only when it is unusual — a Quit Claim, a Judicial Sale, an estate deed. Warranty deeds are the ordinary case and are not flagged. |
A real example. 845 W Sunnyside Avenue shows a $1.4M sale. That looks impossibly low until the badges explain it: Partial interest — the price bought a share rather than the building — and 4 parcels, because the filing covers four buildings on one declaration. Both figures were recorded exactly as filed; the badges are what make them readable.
Everre labels rather than judges. There is no "arm's length" box on the form — that is a conclusion, and it is yours to draw. You are shown what the filer declared and left to decide what it is worth.
Buyers and sellers you can click
Where Everre recognises a party, the name on the sale links straight to that contact.
Buyers are always created, because the buyer owns the building now. Sellers are only linked when you already have them — every filing names a seller, and creating a contact for each would fill your list with companies that have already sold and moved on.
County filings name parties at length. "Chicago Title Land Trust Company, as Trustee, Trust Agreement dated 11/9/1993, and known as Trust Number 9569" is one buyer. Long names are shortened to two lines in the table; hover to read the whole thing.
What it will not do
It will not overwrite anything you typed. When a declaration matches a property you already have, it fills in the blanks and leaves the rest alone. If you recorded 24 units and the filer wrote 26, your number stands — you have been inside the building.
It will not create the same thing twice. A sale is matched on the declaration's own id, so running an overlapping window changes nothing. If the county later amends a filing — a corrected price is the common one — the sale you already have is updated rather than duplicated.
The MyDec Updated column
Turning the feed on adds a MyDec Updated column to your properties. It holds the recording date of the most recent declaration seen for that building, and it only moves when something actually changed.
Add it to any view from the Columns control in Database, and sort by it to see what has moved this week.
Backfilling
Backfill a year pulls the last 365 days in one run — about 4,000 Cook County apartment declarations before any city or size filter, which takes minutes rather than seconds. Everything above still holds: nothing duplicates, and nothing you typed is overwritten.
Asking for it instead
The assistant can run the feed and read it back. "Pull the newest MyDec filings", "what would MyDec pick up this week?", or "did the MyDec sync run last night?" all work. It cannot change the filter — widening the net is a decision with a cost, so a person makes it here.
When it looks quiet
A week with no filings and a run that failed look identical from the property table. Recent runs on the settings screen tells you which it was — every run, what it found, and the error if there was one.