The Last Sale Was Decades Ago. So Is the Evidence.

Why the gap between the two dates does the work here

There Is No Recent Sale to Anchor To

Start with what is actually counted. Of the owner-occupied homes in the city of San Bernardino, about 54 percent have been in the same household since before the year 2000, against roughly 51 percent across the county. The city’s housing is also older: the median home here was built around 1973, against roughly 1983 countywide.

What follows from those two numbers is inference, and it is named as inference rather than presented as a third number. They describe how long households have stayed and when houses were built. Neither measures a price, a condition or a market. What they do establish is that in this city the typical inherited home has not changed hands in a very long time, and the conclusion drawn from that is ours.

For someone who has inherited the house, the consequence is immediate. A valuation always has an effective date, and for an inherited property that date is usually in the past. If the house sold two years ago there is a recent, arm’s-length number to reason from. If the household moved in during the nineties there is not. The nearest evidence is other properties, other transactions, and whatever record of this one still exists from around the date itself.

That is not a harder assignment because the house is old, and nothing about a long tenure says a property was neglected. It is a different assignment because the evidence is thinner and further away, and an appraisal that does not say which evidence it reached for is doing less work than it appears to. The Success Kit sets out what is worth gathering from around the date.

Three ways this lands on someone

Three Ways People Arrive Here Late

The date has already passed and nobody arranged anything

The house transferred, months went by, and the question of what it was worth at the time never came up until somebody else asked it. Nothing has gone wrong. A valuation with an effective date in the past is an ordinary instrument and it is what this situation calls for.

Several people inherited it and they need one number

Where a property passes to more than one person, the figure has to be one both sides can look at rather than one either side produced. What makes that possible is not neutrality asserted; it is the reasoning being written down where anyone can check it.

The house is going to be sold and the figure has to hold up

A sale brings a second date into the picture, and the two are not the same question. What the property is worth now and what it was worth at the effective date are separate findings, and conflating them is the most common way this goes wrong.

What the opinion rests on

What the Figure Rests On When the Date Is Old

Every report states its effective date, its intended use, its intended users, and the evidence it relied on to reach the figure. Where the evidence from the date is thin, the report says so, and says what was used instead. That sentence is the difference between an opinion you can check and a number you have to take on faith.

The comparable sales are named. The adjustments are shown with the reason for each one. Where a judgment was made about a property nobody can now inspect as it stood, the judgment is identified as a judgment.

Work is performed to the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice. That is a floor rather than a distinction, and it is stated here because a report that does not meet it should not be relied on, not because meeting it is an achievement.

How the work is done, and where it stops

What We Check, and What We Will Not Answer

The method is ordinary and the reasoning is visible. We identify the effective date, establish what the property was as of that date rather than as it stands today, assemble the evidence that existed around it, and show the adjustments. If a step rested on an assumption, the assumption is named in the report.

We will tell you when a retrospective appraisal is not what you need. Some situations are answered by a far smaller piece of work, and some are not appraisal questions at all.

Here is the line. Whether an inherited property is reassessed in California, what your basis in it is, and what has to be filed and by when are legal and tax questions. They are the two things people ask about most on a page like this, and they belong to your attorney or your accountant. What an appraisal contributes is a supported opinion of value as of a stated date. What it decides is nothing beyond that.

What happens, and what settles the cost

Six Steps, and What Decides the Fee

One. You tell us the property and the effective date, and what the figure is being used for. That last part changes the assignment more than anything else on this list.

Two. We say whether a retrospective appraisal is the right instrument, and whether the date you have is the date your situation actually turns on.

Three. Scope, intended users and fee are agreed in writing. Nothing starts before that is settled.

Four. We inspect the property as it stands, and separately establish what it was as of the effective date. Photographs, listing records, permits and dated repairs from around that time all bear on this, and anything you still hold is useful.

Five. The evidence is assembled and the comparable sales are selected from around the effective date rather than from today’s market.

Six. The report is delivered with its date, its users, its evidence and its reasoning stated on the face of it.

What settles the cost is decided in the first two steps. It moves with the property, the effective date, how far back it sits, and how much of the record from that time still exists. A house held since the nineties with almost no surviving documentation is a different piece of work from one with a full paper trail, and the fee is agreed before anything begins.

San Bernardino inheritance appraisal questions

Requirement, Reach, and the Questions That Are Not Ours

Who reads it, and what each one is testing

Who Relies on the Figure

An heir reads it to find out what they actually received, and usually to find out whether the figure is one they can act on.

An accountant reads it for the effective date and the support behind the figure, because their work depends on both being stated rather than implied.

An attorney reads it for whether the reasoning holds together if somebody disagrees with it later.

Another heir reads it to see whether the same evidence was applied to the whole property rather than to one side of a conversation.

Each of them is testing something different, and all four are testing the same thing underneath: whether the report says how it got there.

The city, and the county around it

One Name, Two Different Places

Background worth having first

Three Things Worth Having Read

If this is not your situation

Where the Better Answer Lives

If the estate is being administered through the court and the valuation is for that process, the San Bernardino probate page deals with what changes when the court’s reach and the property’s market are not the same thing.

If you are not dealing with an estate at all and simply need to know what a property is worth now, the San Bernardino residential page covers which nearby sales belong in that comparison.

If the property is outside this county, the Los Angeles inheritance page is the better starting point.