Home › Guides › Retrospective Appraisals: Valuing a Property as of a Past Date

Retrospective appraisals

A retrospective appraisal answers a harder question than a current one: what was this property worth on a specific day in the past, and what evidence supports that.

When you need one

Estate and date of death. The effective date is the date of death, and the figure establishes the heirs' stepped-up basis. Get it wrong and the consequence surfaces years later when the property sells.

Divorce. Florida courts have discretion over the valuation date for marital assets — date of filing, date of trial, or another date the court sets. Your attorney decides; the appraiser works to it.

Bankruptcy. Usually the petition date, which may be months before anyone engages an appraiser.

Tax appeal. Always 1 January of the tax year in question.

Litigation generally. A date of loss, a date of transfer, the date a dispute arose.

What makes it harder

Only evidence available as of that date counts. Comparable sales must have closed before the effective date, or be adjusted with an explicit market-conditions analysis if they closed after. Sales that happened afterward are not automatically excluded, but using them requires justification and care — hindsight is exactly what a retrospective assignment must avoid.

Condition then, not condition now. If heirs have cleared the house, a spouse has renovated, or a roof has been replaced since, the appraiser has to establish what was there on the date and reason from that. Sources: photographs, listing history and old MLS photos, permit records, contractor invoices, insurance claims, prior inspection reports, and the testimony of people who saw it.

The market then, not the market now. Valuing a property as of 2008 or 2014 requires knowing what that market did, in that neighbourhood, at that moment.

Why the depth of a file matters here

This is the one area where an appraiser's history is not a marketing claim but a working tool.

Our records run to 34,510 appraisals, in Palm Beach, Martin, St. Lucie and Broward counties, and the firm has been appraising South Florida since 1992. Valuing a Wellington house as of 2004 is a materially different exercise if you have your own files from Wellington in 2004.

What to send us

The more of this you have, the better and faster the assignment goes:

• The exact effective date required, and who set it
• Photographs from on or near that date — phone photos, insurance photos, old listing photos
• The listing history if it was on the market near then
• Permits for work done before and after
• Any inspection or appraisal report from around that period
• For a condominium, the association's documents from that time
• Who has access now, and what has changed since

What we will tell you honestly

If the evidence for a particular date is too thin to support a defensible opinion, we will say so before taking the assignment rather than produce something that collapses under examination. That happens occasionally with very old dates on properties that have changed hands and changed shape several times.

Estate and date of death appraisals · Divorce appraisals · Bankruptcy appraisals · Trust appraisals

Matt Thoren, State-Certified Residential Appraiser. 561-853-2129 · Residential only.