No one stands at the altar imagining that someday they may have to decide who gets the house. No one.
Maybe one of you moved into the other’s house, maybe you bought it together. Maybe it’s the first house either of you has owned, and you got there together. You paint rooms, replace flooring, argue over countertops, plant trees and watch them grow. If you’ve logged some time together, there’s a good chance children may have come home from the hospital there. Careers change. The mortgage gets paid every month. You remodel the kitchen, build a patio, replace the roof and slowly turn a house you purchased together into your home.
And now you’re facing the end of the marriage. Whatever happened between two people to get them to that point is deeply personal, and usually has very little to do with real estate. But once the decision to divorce has been made, the house is part of that process.
And now two people who once made decisions about the home together may have to begin making decisions about it separately.
For some couples, the answer is relatively straightforward. Sell the house, pay the expenses associated with the sale and address the proceeds as part of the larger financial separation. For others, it isn’t nearly that simple.
Tension and emotion can run high during these times. It often seems one person wants to stay. Perhaps the children are still in school and keeping them in the same home feels important. Maybe one spouse loves the house and the other has wanted to leave it for years. Maybe neither person can imagine giving it up. Or perhaps the home represents a significant portion of the wealth accumulated during the marriage, and whatever happens to it will affect what each person can afford to do next.
Suddenly a question that used to be mostly theoretical becomes extraordinarily important: What is the house worth?
Two People Can Know the Same House and See It Differently
Divorce has a way of creating sides, amplifying differences. There is my attorney and your attorney. My accounts and your accounts. Things I brought into the marriage and things you brought into it. There may be disagreements about money, parenting, possessions and events that happened years earlier. Understandably, the house can get pulled into that same dynamic.
One person remembers remodel costs. The other sees things that still need to be repaired. One has been watching homes sell in the neighborhood and thinks prices have climbed dramatically. The other points to a house around the corner that sat on the market for three months. Both genuinely believe they’re right. However, unlike a stock account with a balance displayed on a statement, a home doesn’t come with today’s value printed at the bottom of the page.
You can look online. You can ask a real estate agent. You can look at recent sales. You can remember what you paid and add up what you’ve spent improving it. All of those things can provide information. But when the value of the house is going to become part of a consequential financial decision, sometimes the question needs more than an estimate or somebody’s opinion from one side of the table.
It needs an independent look at the market.
The Person Who Hires the Appraiser Doesn’t Buy the Answer
This can be a strange concept during a divorce and is often misunderstood.
If one spouse calls an appraiser, schedules the observation and pays the appraisal fee, it can feel natural to think of that person as my appraiser. They hired them, after all. But that’s not how appraisal is supposed to work.
An appraiser’s job isn’t to advocate for the side who hired them or wrote the check. We aren’t there to help one spouse get more equity or help the other pay less in a buyout. We aren’t supposed to begin with the number somebody needs and then search for sales that support it.
The assignment is to develop a credible opinion of value from the market evidence. Doing anything other than this in a fair market valuation is to ignore the principles that govern appraisers. That independence can sometimes be frustrating. If you’re hoping the house is worth $900,000 and the market indicates something less, the appraiser doesn’t get to add another $75,000 because your financial plans work better at the higher number. The same is true when someone would benefit from a lower value.
The number doesn’t belong to either person. That’s precisely what can make it useful to both.
Sometimes Agreeing on the Question Can Save a Lot of Fighting Over the Answer
Divorce can become expensive remarkably quickly. There are attorneys, accountants, court costs and sometimes other professionals involved. Every disagreement has the potential to generate another email, another phone call, another meeting or another bill. The house doesn’t need to become another battlefield.
An appraiser is not legal counsel and shouldn’t advise folks how to structure their legal case, but it’s worth noting that in many divorces, the sides can agree to use one independent appraisal rather than begin from the position of competing valuations. This may not be appropriate in every divorce, particularly when counsel calls for something different, but the underlying idea is worth considering:
You don’t necessarily have to agree on what the house is worth to agree on an independent process for finding out.
That’s a very different kind of agreement. Neither person is surrendering their position. Neither is promising to like the answer. They’re simply recognizing that paying professionals to argue indefinitely about a number may not be the best use of the money both people are trying to divide. Often, an independent appraisal gives everyone a place to begin.
Value Doesn’t Decide Who Gets the House
This is another distinction that matters. An appraisal can help answer a valuation question. It doesn’t decide who should stay in the home, how property should legally be divided, what someone is entitled to receive or whether keeping the house is financially wise. Those are different questions.
A family-law attorney may help with the legal questions. A CPA or financial professional may be involved in tax or financial consequences. A lender may determine whether someone can refinance or qualify for a new mortgage. And ultimately, the couple may reach an agreement themselves or a court may make decisions they couldn’t make together.
The appraiser occupies a much narrower lane: What is the property worth as of the relevant date? Sometimes staying in a narrow lane is exactly what makes someone useful.
We’re not there to decide who was right in the marriage. We don’t need to know why it ended. We don’t determine who deserves the house more. We don’t decide whether selling is better than staying. We don’t take the hiring side’s position. We look at the property and the market. In a process filled with people representing different interests, there is something valuable about having at least one person whose job is not to choose a side.
The House Is Still a Home
Of course, saying all of this in financial language can make the house sound remarkably simple. We know it isn’t.
Someone may be walking away from the place they expected to grow old. The other may be terrified about whether they can afford to keep it. Children may still think of it as simply home, largely unaware of the spreadsheets, appraisals, refinancing discussions and legal conversations happening around it.
There may be anger attached to the house. There may also be wonderful memories. Usually there are both. That’s one of the difficult things about valuing property during a divorce. The financial question may be relatively straightforward even when everything surrounding it is not.
A home can represent twenty years of work, sacrifice, arguments, birthday parties, mortgage payments, improvements, family dinners and plans that didn’t turn out the way anyone expected. An appraiser can’t put a number on any of that. Fortunately, we aren’t supposed to.
Our job is to answer the much smaller question the market can answer: what is the property worth? The answer won’t resolve a marriage. The answer won’t make an unfair situation suddenly feel fair, and the answer won’t make difficult decisions painless.
But when two people are beginning the complicated work of separating a life they built together, one independent answer can sometimes mean one less thing they have to fight about.
Christopher Pyle has more than 20 years of real estate appraisal experience in Northern California. He works alongside his mother, longtime appraiser Christine Pyle Banks, at AppraiserChris.com, their family appraisal practice serving the Sacramento region and Sierra Nevada foothills. His work focuses on helping homeowners, families and professionals better understand property value and the decisions that surround it.
