Field Notes
What I'm actually finding out there.
Jason Bitton · RE/MAX Commercial · Libertyville, IL
14 notes · most recent August 13, 2026
Zoning answers, village process, and corridor detail from working deals in Lake County and the north and northwest suburbs. Short entries, dated, written down when I find them. Not market commentary — the specific things that took a phone call, a parcel check, or a village meeting to learn.
Medical office is permitted by right in Libertyville O-2 — the “subject to Village approvals” hedge is wrong.
Marketing sheets in this corridor routinely hedge medical office in O-2 as needing Village approval. It doesn't. Section 26-6-3.2 lists it as a permitted use, codified through Ord. 25-O-43 (12 Aug 2025). I verified the district at parcel level for 1880 W Winchester — PIN 11-18-100-059 — by projecting the parcel onto the Village's own Official Zoning Map rather than trusting the address lookup.
Source: Village of Libertyville Code Ch. 26 Art. 6 Sec. 26-6-3, Supp. 61; Lake County GIS parcel record.
Read the clean copy against the prior draft, section by section — a redline can delete a section without showing it as a deletion.
On an industrial lease this year I found an entire casualty-and-damage section removed, and a safe-harbor paragraph dropped, with neither marked as a deletion in the redline. If you review only the marked changes, both disappear silently. The habit that catches it: put the clean copy beside the last agreed draft and walk the section headings, not the markup.
Source: From leases negotiated in 2026.
21st Street in Zion is county highway A6 — it is not IL-173, and listings that say so are wrong.
Getting the road designation right matters for traffic claims and for anyone modelling access. 21st Street is county highway A6. IL-173 is Rosecrans/Bethlehem, and Sheridan Road is IL-137. Separately, IDOT has never published a count at this parcel — so any traffic figure quoted for this address came from somewhere it should not have.
Source: Lake County highway designations; IDOT published AADT counts.
A Libertyville mailing address does not mean Libertyville zoning — Ashley Circle is Green Oaks LI.
28085 N Ashley Circle carries a Libertyville address and sits under the Village of Green Oaks, in its LI district. Anyone researching permitted uses off the mailing address pulls the wrong code entirely. The same trap runs in both directions across this county: check the parcel's municipality in county GIS before you open any zoning book.
Source: Lake County GIS parcel record; Village of Green Oaks zoning code.
Lake County's short-term-rental restriction applies to residential districts only — RC is a different world.
Owners near the chain of lakes hear that the county restricted short-term rentals and stop there. The restriction is written to residential districts. In RC, Recreational Commercial — unincorporated county, not any village — hotels, cabins and marinas are permitted by right. For a waterfront property in RC, the revenue model people assume is dead is the intended use of the district.
Source: Lake County unified development ordinance, RC district use list.
Norridge B-2 use list is current as of the March 2024 zoning book — but a rewrite is pending at the village.
Anything I or anyone else tells you about permitted uses in Norridge B-2 traces to the March 2024 Zoning Book, which is the operative document today. A full rewrite is pending. If you are underwriting a use that sits near the edge of what is allowed, that pending rewrite is a real risk to price in rather than an abstraction.
Source: Village of Norridge Zoning Book, March 2024; rewrite status confirmed with the village.
Used-car sales is almost never a by-right use in the northwest suburbs — plan on a special use everywhere.
Across Glenview, Northbrook, Wheeling, Des Plaines, Bensenville, Elk Grove Village, Palatine and Buffalo Grove, indoor vehicle sales and storage lands in special-use territory rather than by right. The reliable tell that an application will go smoothly is other dealerships already operating in that same district — where they exist, the village has a pattern to follow. Tenants should make the lease effective only on approval; landlords should expect that contingency and price the risk.
Source: District-by-district verification across eight villages, August 2026.
Lake County composite tax rates run 6.09% to 11.24% — the “12 to 13%” figure people quote doesn't exist in the data.
I pulled all 276 tax codes from the Lake County Clerk for tax year 2025. Median is 9.06%, mean 8.95%, and not one code in the county is above 11.24%. If an underwriting model is carrying 12% or 13% for a Lake County building, it is overstating the tax line and understating what a buyer can pay.
Source: Lake County Clerk, TY2025 tax code rate file (all 276 codes).
Dog grooming: permitted by right in five nearby towns, and completely absent from the code in two.
By right in Lakemoor, Spring Grove, Richmond, Island Lake and Wauconda, and in the City of McHenry only in C-3, C-4 and C-5 — not C-1 or C-2, which is the trap, because a good deal of the storefront inventory downtown is C-1. Johnsburg and McCullom Lake don't list the use anywhere in their codes. That is not the same as prohibited, but it means an interpretation call by staff — get a written determination before signing anything there.
Source: Each municipality's current zoning code, checked August 2026. Wonder Lake not yet researched.
Whichever code source was current for the last town is no guide to this one — check the amendment date every time.
For Lake Zurich, the third-party host carried the current code (through Ord. 2025-11-628, 3 Nov 2025) while the Village's own posted PDF was a 2004 recodification. For Elk Grove Village it was exactly backwards — the third-party copy carried a migration notice pointing at the Village's own 2024 ordinance. Same two sources, opposite answers, one town apart. Read the amendment date on whatever you open before you read the use list.
Source: American Legal Publishing and each village's own posted code, checked August 2026.
Northbrook's Master Land Use Table is a superseded document, and it's the one that comes up first.
The widely-circulated Master Land Use Table PDF belongs to the Village's Former Zoning Code page and was superseded on 22 September 2025. The live code — Articles 5, 6 and 7, last amended 15 July 2026 — drops the O-5 and IB districts entirely. If a use search returns O-5 or IB, the source is out of date, not the answer.
Source: Village of Northbrook zoning code, Articles 5/6/7 (current), against the archived Master Land Use Table.
Peterson Road turns over door by door, and the owners mostly don't know each other.
Seven closings on this one street now — six sales and an office lease at 301 Peterson. What that concentration teaches: these are individually-held units with unrelated owners, so nothing about the block moves as a market. One owner's decision to sell tells you nothing about the neighbor's, which is why the corridor prices unevenly and why a buyer waiting for a comparable sale on this street waits a long time.
Source: Transactions closed on Peterson Rd, Libertyville, 2022 to 2026.
Vernon Hills wants a site plan before it will even discuss a daycare use.
Asked the Village directly how a daycare operator should start. The answer: a basic site plan showing pick-up and drop-off, employee parking, and play-area access — before any application. Worth knowing this is a first step and not a later one; operators who lead with the lease and handle the site plan afterward lose weeks.
Source: Village of Vernon Hills Community Development, written reply, July 2026.
A national restaurant brand can like your drive-thru site and still do nothing, because nobody is assigned to the market.
Pitching a downtown Mundelein drive-thru outparcel to a national coffee brand, the answer came back that they had no franchisee in that market at all — the site went on a watch list rather than into a pipeline. Before building a marketing push around a specific brand, ask whether the territory has a franchisee. Corporate real estate teams cannot act on a site with no operator behind it, no matter how well it fits the prototype.
Source: Direct outreach to national restaurant real-estate teams, 2025.
