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Real property valuation for family law counsel

The marital home is usually the largest asset on the schedule and the most emotionally priced. The appraisal exists to replace two anchored opinions with one defensible number — which only works if the appraisal itself survives the other side's expert.

The date, the access, the instruction

The date is a legal decision. Florida gives the court discretion over valuation dates for equitable distribution. We take the date from counsel and build to it — current or retrospective, and occasionally both, when appreciation between filing and trial is itself in dispute.

Access is where these assignments go sideways. One spouse in the home, one out; an inspection refused or performed under supervision hostile enough to matter. A report produced without interior access carries stated limiting conditions — better to solve access through counsel before the assignment than to argue the limitation after it.

Instruction stops at scope. We are regularly engaged jointly by both parties or both attorneys, which halves the cost and removes the duelling-expert dynamic. Either way the engagement is the same: scope from the client, conclusion from the evidence.

What the report must survive

Deposition and cross. That standard shapes the file from the first comparable: selection explained rather than asserted, adjustments supported from the market, condition documented at inspection, and every limiting condition stated plainly. A report that shades toward its client is not an asset — it is the exhibit the other side reads aloud.

Where the marital property is the hard kind — waterfront with dockage variables, Wellington equestrian improvements, an Acreage parcel with a barn the county calls an outbuilding — the spread between careful and casual valuation is routinely the largest number in the case, and those are the assignments we built the practice on.

The record

34,510 appraisals in South Florida; appraising here since 1992. 391 field reviews — formal examinations of other appraisers' work, which is precisely the exercise of testing the opposing valuation. Our staff includes an MAI and SRA designated appraiser. No values, names or subject photographs are ever published.

If our analysis will not help your client, we say so before the retainer is spent — knowing early that the other side's number is defensible is worth more than discovering it at trial.

Divorce appraisals · Litigation support and review · Retrospective valuation

Matt Thoren, State-Certified Residential Appraiser · 561-853-2129 · Residential only. We are appraisers, not attorneys; nothing here is legal advice.