By accessing and using dapkusinspections.com, you agree to these Terms of Use. They are short in substance: this is a reference site, it sells nothing and arranges nothing, and what you read here is general information about kinds of municipal record rather than advice about a particular building, a particular file or a particular City process.
General information only
Everything published here is provided for general informational and educational purposes. It is not legal advice, real estate advice, engineering, architectural or construction advice, insurance advice, tax advice, or advice of any other professional kind. Reading this site, emailing us, or acting on something written here creates no professional, advisory, agency, fiduciary or client relationship between you and the publisher. No service of any kind is available through this website.
This site performs no inspections and acts in no City process
This site performs no inspections, schedules none and quotes none. It does not retrieve, request, file, submit, expedite, certify, contest or interpret anything on anyone's behalf, and it refers no one. It has no access to any permit file, inspection record, violation file, hearing docket, closing file or property record, and no ability to intervene with the Department of Buildings, any other City department, an inspector, an architect, an engineer, a contractor, a seller, a brokerage, a title company or a lender. Nothing published here is an offer to act for you in any capacity, and nothing here should be read as guidance through a municipal procedure.
No affiliation
Any department, agency, program, dataset, code provision or document named on this site is named for identification and reference only. Naming the Department of Buildings, quoting a code section or describing a published dataset does not imply membership, accreditation, approval, sponsorship or endorsement in either direction. This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or speaking for the City of Chicago or any part of it. All trademarks and service marks remain the property of their respective owners, and their use here is nominative — identification and commentary.
In particular, this site is not affiliated with, endorsed by or a continuation of any business that previously used this domain name, and no page here is a statement by, about or on behalf of such a business or any person connected with it.
Accuracy, and what changes
A careful effort is made to keep this material accurate and traceable to primary sources, but the underlying documents move. Code titles are recodified and sections renumbered. Departmental guidance is withdrawn and replaced. Datasets gain and lose fields, and some are marked deprecated while remaining online. Agencies reorganize their websites and an address that supported a sentence last year returns an error this year. Statements here reflect the sources as read at the time of writing, and the authoritative version of any public document is the one published by the body that issued it, not our summary of it.
Chicago-specific material
Everything on this site describes the City of Chicago's own records and the code they are written against. None of it describes how permitting or inspection works anywhere else, including elsewhere in Cook County or in any other Illinois municipality, and a record that exists in Chicago may not exist at all under another jurisdiction's system. Where this site refers to another city by way of comparison, it is a comparison and nothing more. Do not assume that a Chicago rule described here governs a building outside Chicago, and do not assume that the absence of a rule here means a building outside Chicago has none.
No warranty
This site and everything on it are provided "as is" and "as available", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, completeness or non-infringement. There is no warranty that the site will be available without interruption, that it is free of errors, or that any external document it cites will remain where it was when the citation was made.
Limitation of liability
Your use of this site is at your own risk. To the fullest extent permitted by law, dapkusinspections.com, its publisher and its authors are not liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, special or punitive loss or damage arising out of your use of, or reliance on, anything published here — including any decision to buy or not buy a building, to close or not close on a date, to treat a record as evidence of work having been inspected, to treat the absence of a record as evidence that nothing happened, or to act or refrain from acting in any City permitting or enforcement matter.
Intellectual property
The original text, structure, artwork and code of this site are our own work and are provided for personal reading. You may quote reasonable excerpts with attribution and a link, and you may link to any page freely. Systematic copying, republication, or scraping for the purpose of reproducing this material elsewhere is not permitted. The Municipal Code, departmental guidance, published datasets and audit reports referenced here remain the property and the responsibility of the bodies that issue them.
External links
This site links to the Municipal Code, Department of Buildings pages, City datasets, Inspector General reports and a small number of related independent references so that readers can verify what it says. A link is not an endorsement. We do not control the linked material and are not responsible for its content, its accuracy, its availability or its privacy practices.
Acceptable use
You agree not to use this site in a way that interferes with its operation or with another reader's use of it. That includes attempting unauthorized access to the server or any connected system, probing for vulnerabilities, transmitting malicious code, or running automated requests at a volume that degrades performance for others. Well-behaved crawling that respects the robots file is welcome; wholesale scraping in order to republish the site is not.
Machine-readable content
A structured entity map and JSON-LD markup are published deliberately, so that search engines, answer engines and research tools can read this material accurately instead of inferring it. Using those files to quote or cite the site is within their intended purpose. Using them to reconstruct the site's content as a competing resource is not, and the intellectual property terms above apply to machine access exactly as they apply to a human reader.
Severability
If any provision of these terms is held unenforceable, that provision will be limited or severed to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions continue in full force.
Changes to these terms
These Terms of Use may be revised at any time. The version published on this page when you access the site is the version that applies, and continued use after a revision is acceptance of the revised terms.