“My ex wants to hire their own appraiser. Does that mean I need one too?”
It is one of the first questions I get once a divorcing couple realizes the house has to be valued. The instinct is that if the other side has an expert, you had better have one too, or you will get steamrolled. It feels like gearing up for a fight.
Most of the time, you do not need two divorce appraisers. In Colorado, the better answer is usually one appraiser both sides agree on. Here is why, and when a second one is actually worth the money.
What Colorado actually expects: one appraiser first
Colorado’s divorce procedure rule, C.R.C.P. 16.2, was written to keep dissolutions from turning into expensive expert-driven battles. Among other things, it expects the parties to at least consider using a single joint expert for a valuation issue before each side runs out and hires its own. The house is the most common place that comes up.
A joint appraiser is engaged by both spouses together. The work itself is no different from any other appraisal: recent comparable sales, verified through county records, adjusted for size, condition, and location, and reconciled into a supported opinion under the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP). What changes is the arrangement around it. Communications with a joint appraiser get shared with both sides, the draft findings go to both parties before anything is final, and the cost is split. Nobody is working in a back room for one spouse.
Why a joint appraisal usually wins
The math is the easy part. One appraisal costs about half of two. But cost is not the main reason attorneys and mediators lean this way.
The bigger reason is that a jointly engaged appraiser is almost impossible to attack. When both spouses hired the same person and both paid, neither one can stand up later and claim the value was slanted toward the other. That takes the single most contested number in the divorce and turns it into a settled fact the rest of the negotiation can be built on. In a mediation especially, that is worth far more than the few hundred dollars it saves. It removes the fight before it starts.
The dueling-appraiser problem
Now picture the other path. Each spouse hires their own appraiser. Predictably, the two values do not match, and now the couple is not arguing about the house, they are arguing about whose expert is right. If it goes to a hearing, the judge is left to decide which appraisal to believe, or to split the difference in a way that may satisfy no one. You have paid for two reports to end up with a number a court picked for you.
Dueling appraisals have their place, but they are the expensive, adversarial version of solving a problem that one neutral report usually solves cleanly. If the goal is to settle and move on, two appraisers often push you the opposite direction.
But isn’t a divorce appraiser loyal to whoever pays?
This is the fear underneath the whole question, so it is worth answering directly. The worry is that an appraiser hired by your spouse will quietly shade the value to help them, and that you need your own hired gun to balance it out.
That is not how a credible appraisal works. USPAP prohibits an appraiser from acting as an advocate for any party. The report is signed under a certification of impartiality, and an appraiser who tilts a value to favor whoever is paying is committing an ethics violation, not doing their job. A good appraiser reaches the same number whether one spouse is paying, both are, or a court ordered it. That is the entire point of using a credentialed, independent professional rather than a friend of the family with a real estate license. The neutral joint appraisal is not a compromise on quality. It is the same defensible number, with the added benefit that neither side can even allege bias.
When two appraisers actually make sense
There are real cases for a second opinion, and I will tell you when you are in one. If a joint appraisal already came back and you have a specific, grounded reason to think it missed something, a condition issue, a comparable sale that should not have been used, an error in the square footage, then a review or a second appraisal is reasonable, and Colorado lets a party retain their own expert if they genuinely disagree. The same is true if the other side pushed to use an appraiser you have real reason to distrust. What does not make sense is hiring a second appraiser reflexively, before anyone has even seen a number, just because it feels like leveling the field.
How I handle these
I take divorce work either way. I am regularly engaged as the single neutral appraiser for both spouses, which is the arrangement I would point most couples toward. I also get hired by one party, and I do straightforward reviews of an appraisal the other side produced when someone wants a credentialed second read before they accept or challenge a value.
To get started, the useful things to send are the property address, whether I am being engaged by one spouse or jointly by both, the effective date the value has to speak to, any prior appraisal or listing history already in the file, and what you know about the home’s condition and access. From there I can confirm the fee, the timeline, and the scope.
The bottom line
The reflex to match the other side expert-for-expert is understandable, and in a divorce it usually costs you money and makes the fight worse. One neutral appraiser both spouses agree on is faster, cheaper, and harder to argue with, and Colorado’s own rules point you there first. Save the second appraiser for the case that genuinely needs one.
If you are working a dissolution and trying to decide how to get the house valued, that is an easy conversation. Send it over and I will tell you what makes sense.
About the author
Charles E. Volk, SRA, is the principal of VolkHaus Appraisals in Denver, Colorado. He holds the SRA designation from the Appraisal Institute, has 24 years of residential appraisal experience across Colorado and the western United States, and serves on the Board of the Colorado Chapter of the Appraisal Institute. He works with family law and estate attorneys, mediators, CPAs, fiduciaries, community banks, and private clients throughout Denver Metro and Boulder County.