How we made this.

2 · The numbers

One canonical stats layer. A figure without provenance fails the build.

Every number on this site — every one, on every page — resolves through a single dataset. There is no second source of numbers. A figure typed directly into a page is not a style violation here, it is a build error: the stats loader throws if any published figure lacks a source URL and an as-of date. That is how “every number has a source” stops being a slogan and starts being a compiler.

It matters because six of the twenty competitor sites we read contradict themselves across their own pages — one publishes three different median prices; another puts the same neighborhood at $176,600 on one page and $288,000 on another. Neither of them is lying on purpose. They just have no canonical layer, so nobody ever finds out. Hover any dotted number on this site and it will show you its source, its as-of date, and its year-over-year change. Check us.

Dataset last reviewed end-to-end: 2026-07-14. Counted at build time from the dataset itself — not typed onto this page by hand.

3 · The figures we could not verify

We publish them rather than dropping them.

5 of them carry no number at all — they render as — with a dagger, because we could not get to a primary source and we will not borrow a competitor’s guess. The obvious move is to quietly delete them. We keep them, in the open, for one reason: they are the proof that the rest were checked. A site with no gaps has either done extraordinary work or no work at all, and from the outside you cannot tell which. A site that shows you exactly where it ran out of evidence has told you what its standard is, and you can hold every other figure to it.

• $373,600,000^†KCMO earnings tax annual revenue

  Roughly $374M a year — which is why the tax is not going away. VERIFY: kcmo.gov blocks automated fetches; this figure was read from the city's own page text but was not confirmed by opening the page directly.

• 91.056^†Total mill levy — Overland Park in Shawnee Mission school district (USD 512)

  Summed from the county's own levy sheet: State 1.500 + County 17.290 + Parks 3.023 + Library 3.817 + Overland Park 14.540 + USD 512 (15.435 + 20.000 school general + 7.451 bond + 8.000 capital = 50.886). VERIFY against a real Overland Park tax bill — some parcels also carry fire, drainage or township levies not included here.

• 1.05%^†Effective property tax rate — Overland Park, Johnson County

  0.115 × 91.056/1000 = 1.047%. THE HEADLINE FINDING: Johnson County's effective rate is LOWER than KCMO/Jackson's 1.59%, despite Kansas's scarier-looking mill levy — because Kansas assesses at 11.5% and Missouri at 19%. Excludes the Kansas $75k residential exemption from the 20-mill state school levy. VERIFY with a real bill before publishing.

• 35.704^†Wyandotte County mill levy (county fund, 2026 budget)

  County fund only; the KCK city levy is a separate 36.219 mills on top. Both exceed the revenue-neutral rate. NOT a total levy — schools are extra. Replace with the Unified Government's own adopted budget document before publishing.

• —^†Effective property tax rate — Clay County, MO

  NOT COMPUTED. The Clay County levy sheet is a component list (county funds, city, fire/ambulance, MCC, library, school) that must be summed per tax code. Anchors from the sheet: KC city levy 1.5073; North Kansas City school district #74 levy 5.4943; average school levy 4.8247. Sum the applicable components, then multiply by Missouri's 19% ratio.

• —^†Effective property tax rate — Platte County, MO

  NOT VERIFIED. No primary Platte County levy sheet was retrieved. Pull the Platte County Clerk's levy sheet (or the State Auditor's certified rates), sum the components for the relevant tax code, and multiply by 19%. Do not publish a number until this is done.

• —^†Typical KC wind/hail deductible

  THE REAL STORY, BUT UNVERIFIED TO A PRIMARY SOURCE. Multiple industry sources agree KC-area wind/hail deductibles are now a PERCENTAGE of dwelling coverage (commonly 1–2%), not a flat dollar amount — so a $400k home carries a $4,000–$8,000 hail deductible, not $1,000. This is the single most under-reported cost of owning here. MUST be confirmed against actual carrier filings or the Missouri Dept. of Commerce & Insurance before we publish a number.

• —^†Kansas City cost of living index (U.S. = 100)

  DELIBERATELY NULL. Kansas City is NOT among MERIC's participating Missouri cities, so the authoritative C2ER index does not cover it. Competitors publish 8%, 9%, 11%, and 'ExtraSpace: 11%' below national — none cite a source, and Dani Beyer contradicts herself (9% on one page, 11% on another). Until we buy the C2ER COLI data for the KC MSA, we say so rather than picking a competitor's number. Anchor cost-of-living claims on line items we CAN source (water, taxes, insurance, median price) instead of a composite index.

• —^†Kansas City, MO violent crime rate

  NULL ON PURPOSE. Secondary aggregators put KCMO at roughly 1,478–1,547 per 100k for 2024 (vs a ~359 national rate — about 4x), but they disagree with each other and none is primary; one widely-surfaced source reports a homicide rate of '6.1 per 100k', which is arithmetically impossible for a city with ~129 homicides and ~510k people. Pull the number from FBI CDE or KCPD directly. TWO FRAMING RULES when we do: (1) this is Kansas City, MO CITY — not the 2.25M-person metro, and Johnson County is one of the safest large counties in the U.S.; (2) violent crime here is heavily geographically concentrated, so a citywide rate badly misdescribes most neighborhoods. Publish the concentration, not just the rate.

• 200^†Total registered fountains in the KC area

  Sources say 'more than 200', so treat 200 as a FLOOR, not an exact count — render it as '200+'. KC claims more fountains than any city outside Rome; that specific superlative is folklore and we should not assert it.

4 · The myths we killed

Checking the scary numbers made them smaller. We published that anyway.

Two of the loudest “honest cons” in Kansas City relocation content are false, and we only found out because we went to the regulator and the police department instead of to another blog. Both were in our own draft. Both got cut and republished as myths, which is a worse story and a better site.

The Honest Cons, in full →

5 · Who publishes this

A working real-estate agent publishes this site. She would like to sell you a house.

Move to KC is published by Nataliya Hennings, a licensed REALTOR® with RE/MAX Innovations. It is a research and reference site. When you are ready to look at houses, that happens at kc-relo.com.

Nataliya Hennings runs two websites, and it is worth being precise about which is which, because the difference is the entire design of this one. kc-relo.com is her brokerage site: the live Heartland MLS search, the listings, the contact form, the showings — the place where a conversation becomes a transaction. Move to KC is a reference. It publishes the state-line calculator, the sourced figures, the open-house map, and the claims we killed. It has no lead form. It does not want your email. It is meant to be checked, quoted, and linked to, including by people who will never hire her and by agents who compete with her.

Why separate them at all? Because a page that is trying to sell you a house cannot also be trusted to tell you the honest cons of the city it is selling you a house in — not because the author is dishonest, but because you have no way to know, and you are right not to take the chance. Splitting the two lets this one be written straight. The cost of that arrangement is an obligation: we have to say, on every page, that the same person owns both. A second domain that quietly funnels searchers to the first, without disclosing it, is what Google calls a doorway page, and it would deserve to be treated as one. So the disclosure runs in the footer of every page, in the byline of every story, on the search box, and here.

Nataliya on kc-relo.com↗Nataliya on this site

Data accuracy

How accurate this is — and what that means for you

Every figure on this site is gathered in good faith from sources believed reliable — county assessors, the U.S. Census, state statutes, the live MLS feed — and it is dated and cited wherever the source can be practically shared. That is a real standard, and most relocation sites do not meet it. It is not a guarantee.

Data changes. Rates are recertified, listings turn over, and two reputable sources can report different values for the same measure: a median computed over different sales, a home-value index versus a closed-sale price, a mill levy that depends on the exact parcel and taxing district. Where we know sources disagree, we say so. Where a figure could not be verified against a primary document, we left it out rather than print a guess.

Treat every number here as a well-sourced starting point, not the last word. Verify anything that will influence a decision against the primary source before you rely on it. Nataliya Hennings has made a best-effort attempt at accuracy and shares her sources where she can; the reader is responsible for confirming any figure and for any decision in which it played a part.