Why ‘what’s it worth?’ isn’t the most important question in probate property

The difficulty in valuations

‘What is the property worth?’ sounds like a request for information, but in my line of work it is often is a request for reassurance. Somebody dies, a house gets left behind, and before anyone has worked out where the stopcock is, or indeed whether there is one, I, or an estate agent or surveyor, are on the phone being asked to name a figure. As though the house has been sitting there for decades quietly holding a number in reserve, waiting for one of us to say the right thing to it.

None of us really can, which took me longer to admit than I’d like. Put the same house in front of three perfectly competent professionals and you will likely get three different figures, and none of them will be lying to you. The surveyor produces one number, the estate agent another, I’ll produce a third, each of us explaining our reasoning with equal conviction, and everyone else is left with the entirely reasonable instinct to assume two of the three must simply be wrong. A house has a value, surely. It’s not opinion, it’s bricks.

Except it is opinion, in the sense that it depends heavily on who you ask and what they intend to do about it. The property industry has largely stopped noticing this. Ask what a painting is worth and the answer changes depending on whether you’re talking to an insurer, a collector or an auction house. Property behaves much the same way.

Probate makes this worse, because probate property is rarely a normal sale conducted in normal circumstances with the luxury of time. There’s an executor carrying legal responsibilities they didn’t ask for and beneficiaries with a range of opinions. There’s a tax deadline that doesn’t care about anyone’s feelings. And there’s a house that has spent decades absorbing one person’s decisions about maintenance and upkeep, none of them made with a future sale in mind.

The temptation, and I see this constantly, is to treat all of that as background noise affecting the price. It does affect the price. But it affects something more useful first: who is going to buy the thing. Almost everyone skips this question, because it’s easier to argue over whether the guide price should be £425,000 or £450,000 than to stop and ask who is in a position to buy.

A different market

A pristine, freshly decorated family home attracts a specific kind of buyer; someone who needs a mortgage, who is thinking about school catchment areas and wants to live in the house rather than renovate it. That’s a slow, chain-dependent buyer, and the whole apparatus of viewings, offers, searches and negotiation has evolved to suit exactly that person.

Strip out 40 years of maintenance, so the wiring is dated, the bathroom hasn’t been touched since the seventies, and the roof needs attention, and the buyer pool doesn’t just shrink, it changes. The mortgage buyers largely disappear. Developers, renovators, landlords and cash buyers take their place, and none of them are troubled by the bathroom, because they were never planning to keep it. The house hasn’t lost value. It has found a different set of people who consider it genuinely valuable, in a way the first audience never would have.

And yet the process rarely changes to reflect any of this. The house gets sent down the same route regardless, because it’s the route houses conventionally go down. Estate agents are, for most houses, the right answer. But ‘usually correct’ can harden into ‘always correct’, and it becomes a default nobody quite remembers agreeing to.

The auction alternative

Auction is worth raising here, not as a universal solution, but because it suits exactly the buyer who turns up once a house stops being a home and starts being a project. It brings competing buyers into one transparent environment and lets the outcome be settled in public, in a matter of weeks, rather than dragged out privately over months. That won’t be the right route for every probate property. A well-kept house in a desirable village does not need the same treatment as a derelict bungalow that has stood empty for decades.

Most people encounter auction, if they encounter it at all, as a last resort, once the ‘for sale’ board has been up for a year and the reductions have run out of road. That’s a reasonable impression to have formed, given how it’s usually presented, but it doesn’t hold up against what actually happens with unmodernised stock. Put competing, well-informed buyers in front of exactly this kind of property, and the price achieved tends to outperform the open market rather than merely match it, because those buyers already understand what they’re looking at and are competing openly to secure it, rather than negotiating privately to chip it down.

The market always has the final word anyway. A valuation is a considered estimate, however well informed. A completed sale is a verdict. There’s always a temptation, once a sale has gone through, to talk as though the final figure had been inevitable all along. It never is. A different buyer, a different week, a different interest rate, and the number moves. That doesn’t make the original valuation wrong. It’s a reminder that value gets arrived at through the process, not discovered fully formed beforehand.

None of this is an argument for auctioning every property. That would be the same mistake in the opposite direction. It’s an argument for asking a better first question. Not what’s it worth, but who is actually going to buy it, and which route gives them the best chance of doing so. Answer that honestly and the valuation stops being the main event. It settles into its proper place: one useful fact among several, which is where it belonged all along.