The court gave you authority over the house. It did not give you instructions.
That is where most personal representatives start. You have letters, you have a key, and you have a list of people waiting to hear what happens next. Nobody hands you a sequence.
Here is the sequence, at least for the house. Roughly the first ninety days, in the order the work actually comes at you. Your attorney drives the legal side of the estate and you should follow their direction over anything here. I handle one piece of this, the value. But I have watched a lot of families walk this path, and the same avoidable problems show up over and over.
First, make the house boring
Before anything else, get the property stable. Change the locks if keys are floating around the family. Have the mail forwarded or picked up, because a stuffed mailbox advertises an empty house. Keep the utilities on, especially heading into winter, since a Front Range house with the heat off is a burst pipe waiting to happen.
Then call the insurance carrier and tell them the situation. That one catches people. Homeowner policies generally treat an unoccupied house differently than one somebody lives in, and coverage can narrow once it sits empty. Insurers do not read the obituaries. Nobody is going to flag it for you. Call, say the owner has died and the house is vacant, and ask what the policy needs.
Second, leave it alone for a minute
The instinct is to start clearing the house out. Family arrives, everybody wants to be useful, and within two weekends the place is empty and someone has painted the kitchen.
Slow that down. The estate’s value has to be measured as of the day the owner died, in the condition the house was in on that day. Once the furniture is gone, the carpet is pulled, and the fixtures have been swapped, documenting that condition gets harder. Not impossible. I do it regularly on estates that reach me years later. But it costs accuracy, and accuracy is the whole point of the exercise.
If you do nothing else this month, take pictures before anything moves. Every room, the exterior, the roof, the furnace and water heater, the parts nobody thinks to photograph. Twenty minutes on your phone is worth more to this file than most people would guess.
Third, get the value set as of the right date
Here is the part people get wrong most often, and it is the part I actually handle.
The value that matters is not what the house is worth today. It is what the house was worth on the date of death. Those are two different numbers, and in a market that has moved the way Denver Metro has, they can be very different. The estate does not get to use today’s number. It also does not get to use the county assessor’s value or an online estimate, neither of which was built for this purpose and neither of which anyone signed.
That value comes from a date-of-death appraisal. It is a normal appraisal with the clock set back: comparable sales that had actually closed by that date, the market conditions that existed then, and the condition the house was in at the time.
If the death was recent, this is straightforward. If it was two years ago, or ten, it can still be done. That is a retrospective appraisal, and it is a standing part of my practice. The further back you go, though, the more the work depends on evidence somebody happened to save, which is the argument for handling it now instead of later.
Fourth, the inventory
Within about three months of your appointment, Colorado expects you to inventory what the estate owns, valued as of the date of death. The state’s own instructions phrase it as ninety days. There is a form for it, and your attorney will either hand it to you or point you to it.
For most estates, the house is the largest line on that page. It also tends to be the one line where people write in a number that did not come from anywhere in particular. Anyone with an interest in the estate can ask to see that inventory, so the number is not private, and you are the one who signed it.
Fifth, know where that number travels
This is the part nobody explains up front. The value you put on the house does not stop at the inventory. It follows the property through everything that comes after.
It sets the heirs’ tax basis. When someone inherits a house, their gain on a later sale is measured from the date-of-death value, not from what Mom and Dad paid for it in 1978. A number set carelessly today can quietly create a tax bill for your siblings years from now.
It sets the terms if one heir buys out the others. The sibling who wants to keep the house is buying at that number, and the ones who are not keeping it are being paid based on it. Estates get ugly right here, and it is almost always because the number came from a source nobody trusts.
It is the number that gets questioned. If a dispute comes later, or an IRS review on a taxable estate, the question is never what you personally believed the house was worth. The question is who determined it, how, and whether the file holds up.
Sixth, then sell or distribute
Once the value is documented and the inventory is done, you can move. Sell the house, deed it to the heirs, whatever the will and your attorney direct.
The order matters. Value first, then the transaction. Done in that sequence, an eventual sale price becomes evidence that supports your file. Done backwards, you are reverse-engineering a value to match a sale, which is exactly the thing that does not hold up when someone pushes on it.
And when the house does sell months later for more than the date-of-death value, that is not an error. Time passed, the market moved, and the property was marketed and negotiated. Two different questions, two different answers, both correct.
What this looks like from my side
Most of the time, an executor calls, gives me the address and the date of death, and tells me what shape the house is in and how I get inside. From there I can confirm the fee and the turnaround before anyone commits to anything. If you want to see what I need from you before you call, it is all on one page. If the house has already been emptied or the death was years back, say so on that first call. It changes what I need from you, and it is a solvable problem, not a dead end.
The bottom line
You were handed a house, a set of obligations, and no sequence. The sequence is: stabilize it, photograph it, get the value set as of the date of death, put that number on the inventory, then sell or distribute. Almost every expensive estate problem I see traces back to those steps happening out of order.
If you are the personal representative and the house is the part keeping you up at night, that is an easy conversation. Send over the address and the date 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 estate and family law attorneys, CPAs, fiduciaries, community banks, and private clients throughout Denver Metro and Boulder County.