Method brief
Owner-occupied vs absentee, mapped.
The assessor's file carries two addresses for every parcel: where the house is, and where the tax bill goes. Compare them and the county splits by decision-maker. One owner walks out the front door every morning. The other opens an envelope somewhere else. They buy the same roof for completely different reasons, and the public record tells you which is which, block by block.
1,114,309Parcels with enough address data to classifyAssessor + mailing file
15.1%Absentee county-wide (168,429 parcels)Derived from mailing address
4.7% to 32.2%Township absentee rangeDerived · township level
82.5%Absentee share of six-unit buildingsDerived · assessor unit count
01 · The split
Fifteen percent of the county mails from somewhere else.
Of the 1,114,335 residential parcels on the assessor's file, 1,114,309 carry enough address information to classify. 945,880 of those (84.9%) receive their mail at the property itself. 168,429 (15.1%) receive it elsewhere. Every percentage on this page uses that populated set as its denominator, and the 26 parcels with no usable address record are dropped rather than assigned to either side.
Fifteen percent sounds ignorable. It isn't, for two reasons. The absentee slice concentrates hard by geography, by building type and by price band, and each concentration is a different conversation with a different buyer. Sold as one campaign, it wastes both.
The read for contractors
Two mail pieces, minimum. The owner-occupant buys comfort, curb appeal, and protecting the place they sleep, and they buy it at the kitchen table. The absentee owner buys cost per unit, tenant retention, and what a failure costs in vacant months. Same roof, different arithmetic, different envelope, different address.
Highest and lowest absentee shareAssessor · by township
02 · Geography
A sevenfold spread inside one county line.
North Chicago Township runs 32.2% absentee. Orland runs 4.7%. Those two townships sit inside the same county, under the same assessor, on the same file, and a mail plan built on the county average is badly calibrated for both of them.
The cleanest single cut is the city line. Group the eight townships that cover Chicago and they come in at 21.2% absentee. The thirty suburban townships average 11.0%. If your service area straddles that boundary, your absentee exposure roughly doubles as you cross it.
Share and volume rank differently, which is where most targeting goes wrong. Lake Township's absentee share is mid-table, unremarkable next to the leaders. Lake is also the county's largest township, so it holds 26,848 absentee-owned parcels, the biggest single pool in Cook. West Chicago Township holds 20,476. Orland, the most owner-occupied township on the file at 95.3%, holds 1,335. Chase percentages and you end up in the small townships. Chase counts and you end up in the city.
The read for contractors
Pick the metric that matches the constraint. Route limits and crew density are volume problems, so rank by absentee count. Creative and script decisions are mix problems, so rank by share. A township can top one list and sit at the bottom of the other.
Most owner-occupied townshipsAssessor · owner-occupied share
| Township | Owner-occupied |
|---|---|
| Orland | 95.3% |
| River Forest | 93.4% |
| Wheeling | 93.1% |
| Palos | 92.8% |
| Schaumburg | 92.6% |
03 · Doors
The strongest signal in the file is how many front doors the building has.
Single-family parcels run 10.7% absentee, 100,953 of them. Multi-family parcels run 39.1%, which is 67,476 of 172,611. That gap is wider than anything geography produces, and inside the multi-family group the gradient is nearly mechanical: two units 27.8%, three units 43.8%, four units 59.4%, five units 71.7%, six units 82.5%.
Age barely moves it by comparison. Pre-1980 stock is 15.9% absentee across 942,384 parcels, or 150,143 homes; everything built in 1980 or later is 10.6%. The oldest tier does lift, with pre-1940 stock at 22.2%, while the 1980s and 1990s bottom the county out at 8.5%. Cross age with doors and the door count wins: across the 165,716 pre-1980 multi-family parcels the absentee share is 38.3%, against 11.2% for pre-1980 single-family. Same vintage, same weather, three and a half times the absentee rate.
The read for contractors
If you sell by roof square rather than by household, the multi-family tier is where your average job size and your absentee share climb together. That is a commercial-style sale wearing residential clothing: scheduling around tenants, one signature covering several units, and a buyer who wants a payback period rather than a color sample.
Absentee share by units in buildingAssessor num_apartments
04 · Value
Absentee share is a smile, not a slope.
Everyone assumes rental stock is cheap stock. Plot absentee share against assessed value across the 1,101,995 parcels carrying a value and the curve bends the other way at the top. The band under $10k assessed runs 28.3% absentee. It falls through the middle to a floor of 11.3%. Then it climbs back: 16.0% in the $50k to $100k band, 18.9% above $100k.
Assessed value in Cook is a fraction of market value, so treat those bands as relative tiers rather than sale prices. The shape is the finding. Two very different populations sit at the two ends of it, and neither one is the homeowner most exterior marketing is written for.
The read for contractors
The mid-market single-family owner-occupant is the trough of this curve, which is a fine place to compete as long as you know both tails belong to someone else. Aim high-value creative at a homeowner and it lands in front of a holding entity; aim investor economics at the middle and it lands in front of a family.
Absentee share by assessed-value bandAssessor assessed_value
05 · Permits
The two segments leave different paper trails.
Match the occupancy flag against the county roof-permit file and the rates separate. 7.9% of owner-occupied parcels have a roof permit on record, or 74,824 homes. Absentee parcels: 4.6%, or 7,767.
Be careful about what that does and does not say. It is not a statement about the condition of anything. Permitting practice, work scope, and who files the paperwork all vary by owner type, so the gap is at least partly a records artifact rather than a market signal. What it does change is operations. Permit suppression, the cheapest waste-cutting move in exterior direct mail, strips a much smaller share off an absentee list than off an owner-occupant list. The two lists decay at different speeds and should not be held to the same suppression benchmark.
The read for contractors
Run suppression separately by segment and report it separately. A blended "we removed eight percent" number tells you nothing about either list, and it will quietly overstate how clean your absentee file is.
Roof permit on file, by owner typeCounty roof permits · matched parcels
06 · Run it yourself
The method, including the parts that are wrong.
This is a two-column comparison. Any county file that publishes an owner mailing address alongside the property address supports it, which is most of them, and it takes a spreadsheet rather than software.
The rule
Take the first five digits of the property ZIP and the first five of the mailing ZIP. Different ZIP, flag absentee. Same ZIP, compare the leading house number of each street address. Different number, flag absentee. Otherwise it stays owner-occupied. That is the entire rule, and it is deliberately blunt in two places.
It never compares city names. Assessor files abbreviate mailing cities inconsistently, so a city-name comparison manufactures thousands of false absentees out of owner-occupants whose mailing city is simply spelled shorter. And it treats missing mailing data as owner-occupied rather than guessing. In Cook, 10,770 parcels carry neither a mailing street address nor a mailing ZIP, and every one of them defaults to the owner-occupied side. That is a known undercount of the absentee population, and it belongs in the footnote of any number you quote from it.
Where it is wrong
A method you cannot audit is a method you should not ship. Of the 168,429 Cook parcels this flags absentee, 10,828 of them (6.4%) mail to a PO box, which an owner-occupant living in the house can perfectly well do. Another 20,197 (12.0%) carry an LLC, Inc., Corp. or LP style owner name and 2,664 carry a trust-style name; those are genuine ownership structures, but the mailing address behind them is often an attorney or a management company rather than an investor's kitchen. The cleanest signal in the whole set is the smallest: 18,041 absentee-flagged parcels (10.7%) mail to an address outside Illinois, and there is not much innocent explanation for that one.
So the flag is a segmentation, not a fact about any household. Aggregate it to a township or a neighborhood and the noise averages toward zero, which is why every figure on this page is reported at that level. Point the same flag at one address and it will be wrong often enough to embarrass you in a driveway. TerritoryX does not identify individual landlords, publish owner names, or sell a list of them, and neither should the version you build.
Method & sources
Figures are computed from official public records covering Cook County residential parcels: the Cook County Assessor's property-characteristics file (build year, unit count, single versus multi-family classification, assessed value, township) joined to the assessor's owner mailing-address file, and county building-permit records for the roof-permit comparison. The occupancy flag is derived exactly as described above, from a five-digit ZIP comparison followed by a leading-house-number comparison. Percentages are shares of parcels with the relevant field populated; parcels with a null occupancy flag, null year built, blank unit count or null assessed value are excluded from the denominators of the cuts that use them, and the populated denominator is stated wherever it differs from the county total. Townships shown as the city group are the eight assessment townships covering Chicago; the remaining thirty are grouped as suburban.
Everything here is aggregate. No individual home, parcel identifier or owner is named, and nothing on this page is a claim about the condition of any specific property. The same layers, scored neighborhood by neighborhood, are what a Territory X-Ray runs on. This brief is recomputed as the underlying county files update.
Cook County Assessor · characteristics, value & mailing address
County permit records · roof permits
TerritoryX · occupancy derivation
Territory Intelligence · by email
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