Down Homes in Lake County

It's that time of the year -- after the snow melts and before the property tax bill arrives in the mail -- when your LakeCountyEye takes advantage of the narrow opportunity to clean house. Operatives are perennially advised to do likewise, and haul those old brokendown televisions and washing machines and barcaloungers out of the house -- and deposit them all on the front lawn. That way, after the tax assessor takes one look he will have to ding your house with the lowest assessment on the block.

So imagine your LakeCountyEye's chagrin when learning that all the heavy, backbreaking lifting this year was for naught. That's because a new national survey puts Lake County squarely in the Top 10 most undervalued real estate markets. In fact, Trulia rates Lake County the 2nd most undervalued market in the US, between Detroit and Cleveland:

Although national home prices rose significantly in the past two years, they're still 5% undervalued compared with long-term fundamentals.
Top 10 Metros Where Home Prices Are Most Undervalued

The message is obvious. The Lake County real estate market is colder than a Lake Michigan jumping carp in an ice shanty on Superbowl Sunday. This should come as welcome news to Lake County's township assessors. With home prices here ranking somewhere between Detroit and Cleveland, the assessors might as well stay in their township offices this year, and play solitaire on their computers. How hard will it be to score everyone with an assessment of zero?