An estate division blocked for years: what can a valuation do?

Division files stay frozen for five, eight, sometimes ten years. When they are reopened, the disagreement rarely concerns the shares, which are established. It concerns what the property is worth. Why value blocks the file: - Each heir carries an implicit figure from a different source: a local listing, what a neighbour paid, an agency estimate several years old, or what the deceased used to say about the property. - The heir living in the property values it low, because they will have to buy the others out. The heir abroad values it high, because they see the district, not the condition. - Nobody wants to be the one who accepted too little. Without a common reference, doing nothing is the only safe position. - Siblings who no longer speak also fail to agree on who chooses the appraiser. What a valuation brings: 1. A single value at a stated date, with method and comparables on display. Each party can challenge it on an identifiable point — this area, this comparable, this discount — instead of rejecting it wholesale. 2. Quantified real discounts: occupation by one heir, joint ownership, absence of title, works to be redone. These are often the true cause of the disagreement, and nobody had priced them. 3. Balancing payments calculated once the value is fixed and the shares known. 4. Multi-asset estates handled asset by asset, which is what makes allocation possible. 5. A document the absent heir can read without travelling, with time-stamped photographs and measurements. That is frequently what unblocks the family member living abroad. Getting everyone to agree on the appraiser is the practical crux. A report commissioned by one heir alone will be suspected by the others. Three ways to defuse that: have the report sent to every heir at the same time; let another heir pick the firm from a short list; or have the fees borne by the estate rather than by one person. The limits, stated plainly: a valuation does not divide anything, binds nobody and does not replace the deed that will formalise the division. It gives heirs what they were missing — a common basis. Where the deadlock is about something other than value, it will not resolve it, and we say so.