Aurora

Aurora is spread across four counties. Kane, DuPage, Will and Kendall. That is not trivia. It changes your tax bill, your school district and your price. Downtown Aurora sits on the Fox River and holds the oldest housing in the city. West of the river you are mostly in West Aurora District 129. East of the river you are mostly in East Aurora District 131. Then keep going east toward Route 59 and I-88, and that corner of Aurora is in Indian Prairie District 204, the same district that covers south Naperville, full of 1990s and 2000s subdivisions that price much more like Naperville than like downtown Aurora.

The train is Aurora's quiet advantage. The BNSF line runs from Aurora into Union Station, and Aurora is the western end. Every inbound train on that line begins in Aurora, so riders boarding there are getting on an empty train. Naperville, one stop closer to the city, gets those same trains after Aurora has already filled some seats. There is a second wrinkle. The Route 59 station that Naperville lists as one of its two stations has an Aurora address. So on the far east side of Aurora you can be walking distance to a station that Naperville advertises as its own.

Six school districts serve parts of Aurora. The city publishes the list itself. That is more districts than most people expect from one city, and it is the single biggest reason Aurora prices vary so much from block to block. It also means you cannot shop by city name here. You shop by parcel. Every one of those districts has an address lookup on its website, and the county assessor sites will tell you the district and the tax code for any address. That lookup takes about two minutes and it is the highest value two minutes in the whole search.

Here is the price record. The typical home sale in Aurora was $185,000 in 2018, then $186,000, $190,000, $210,000, $230,000, $250,000, $280,000, and $310,000 in 2025. That is up 68% in seven years, about 7.7% a year, a faster climb than Naperville had over the same stretch. There were 6,454 qualifying sales in the 2023 to 2025 window. These come from Illinois transfer declarations, filed with the state whenever a property changes hands. I kept single parcel sales over $10,000 and removed foreclosures, bank owned sales, sales between relatives and court ordered sales.

Two notes about that record. It starts in 2018 because Illinois only began collecting these filings electronically outside Cook County around then, and Kane County records begin in January 2018. That is where the record begins, and nothing is missing from what you see. And this number covers all homes together. Houses, condos, townhomes and duplexes, which is what Chicago calls a two-flat. Outside Cook County the state does not publish a code separating them, so $310,000 is the typical home sale across every kind of home.

Now the two numbers that decide whether a rental pencils. A two bedroom runs roughly $2,050 to $2,200 a month and a three bedroom roughly $2,530 to $2,715, depending on the source. On taxes, and this is the honest trade-off, Aurora's total rates are high. For the 2023 tax year the Kane County Clerk shows total rates on Aurora tax codes running from about 7.47 to 9.43 depending on the code. Kane assesses at 33.33% of market value, so that is roughly 2.5% to 3.1% of a home's value per year before exemptions. Much of that spread is the school district. The rate is real and you should plan for it, and it is completely public. Pull the exact tax code for the exact address before you make an offer, and remember the homestead exemption comes off before the rate is applied.

Here is how I would use this page. Start by deciding whether you want the older river side of Aurora or the newer District 204 side out by Route 59, because those are two different markets wearing the same city name. Pull the tax code and the school district for any specific address before you get attached. The headline is that a $310,000 typical home sale sits on the same commuter rail line as a $560,000 one, one stop away, and half of Aurora traded below $310,000. That is a lot of open door for a first house or a first rental.