Letters issue, your client becomes the personal representative, and a clock starts. Colorado’s probate inventory statute gives a PR three months from appointment to prepare an inventory of the decedent’s property, listing each asset at its fair market value as of the date of death, along with any encumbrances. In most of the estates that cross your desk, the largest number on that inventory belongs to a house.
Here is what the statute never says: where that value is supposed to come from. CRS 15-12-706 requires a sworn figure, then goes silent on method. No appraisal requirement, no standard, no guidance. A personal representative can write down nearly anything that seems reasonable, and plenty of them do.
This post is about that blank spot, why the house value deserves more care than it usually gets, and how to give the inventory a number that will still look good when someone examines it two years from now.
What the probate inventory actually requires
The requirements are short. Within three months of appointment, the personal representative prepares an inventory of the property the decedent owned at death, showing fair market value as of the date of death and the type and amount of any encumbrance. The PR signs it under oath as “complete and accurate so far as he is informed.” Depending on how the administration is structured, the inventory is filed with the court or delivered to the interested persons entitled to it.
Two details shape how this plays out in practice. First, there is no automatic penalty for missing the three-month mark, and in unsupervised administration the inventory may never touch a court file, which tempts some PRs to treat the exercise casually. Second, the probate code allows the PR to bring in a qualified, disinterested appraiser to establish values, but nothing requires it. The result is a sworn valuation duty with no prescribed way to meet it.
That gap matters, because the inventory value does not stay on the inventory.
The house number follows the estate everywhere
Consider what that one figure touches. It anchors the stepped-up basis the heirs will use when the home eventually sells, which means it quietly sets someone’s capital gains exposure. It drives equalization when one heir takes the house and the others take cash. It frames every buyout conversation. It surfaces again in accountings, in creditor discussions, and in any dispute where a beneficiary decides to look closely at how the PR handled the estate.
A value that was defensible on day one settles those questions before they start. A value somebody guessed at invites each of them to reopen, usually a year or two later, when the market has moved and everyone’s memory of the property’s condition has gone soft.
Where the value usually comes from instead
In practice, the house figure on a probate inventory tends to come from one of three places: the county assessor’s records, an online estimate, or a family member’s sense of the neighborhood. Each feels like data. None was built for this job.
The assessor’s value exists for property taxation. It is produced on a mass appraisal cycle, keyed to a statutory date that rarely lines up with a decedent’s date of death, and it can trail a moving market by a year or more. An online estimate has never been inside the house and cannot be pinned to a specific past date; it reflects an algorithm’s guess today, not fair market value on the day the inventory requires. The family’s number is whatever the family needs it to be, which becomes a problem the moment beneficiaries’ interests diverge.
Estate properties make all of this worse. They are disproportionately original-condition homes, held for decades, with kitchens, systems, and deferred maintenance that public records know nothing about. Those are precisely the homes where shortcut values miss by the widest margins.
What a date-of-death appraisal gives the inventory
A date-of-death appraisal solves the exact problem the statute creates. It develops fair market value with an effective date matching the date of death, using comparable sales from that period, with the home’s condition as it actually was, documented in a report that shows its work. If the appointment came months after the death, the assignment is retrospective, which is routine when it is handled deliberately. The analysis is the same disciplined work behind any credible valuation, aimed at the one date the inventory cares about.
For the attorney, the appraisal converts a sworn guess into a supported statement. Your client signed that inventory under oath. When the number behind the signature comes from a credentialed appraiser’s report developed under the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP), a question about the value has an answer waiting. When it comes from a screenshot, the question is just the beginning.
Why the appraiser’s credentials matter on a sworn document
Anyone can produce a number. What the inventory needs is a number attached to someone whose work holds up. This is part of why I built VolkHaus around the SRA designation from the Appraisal Institute: a credential earned through demonstrated experience, peer review, and continuing education, not just licensure. Twenty-four years of residential work across Denver Metro and Boulder County means the comparable sales behind the value reflect how these neighborhoods actually behave, not how a model assumes they do.
What I need from you to start
If you have an administration open with the inventory clock running, a few items up front make the work fast. The property address and the date of death, which together fix the effective date. The appointment date and when the inventory is due, so the timeline is realistic on both ends. A contact for access to the home, or a note if the property has already sold or changed and the analysis needs to reconstruct its condition from photos, listing history, or the family’s description. And the intended use, since a report supporting a probate inventory can often be scoped to serve a later basis calculation as well, and it is cheaper to plan that once than to order twice.
From there I can confirm the fee and turnaround. Most of these assignments fit comfortably inside the three-month window, but the closer the deadline, the more it helps to call early.
The bottom line for estate attorneys
Colorado hands your PR client a sworn valuation duty and no method for meeting it. The house is almost always the number that matters most, and it is the one asset where a shortcut value creates real downstream exposure for the client and real cleanup work for you. An appraisal with a date-of-death effective date closes that gap for a fee that is small next to everything the number controls.
If the clock is running on a file right now, send me the address and the date of death. I will tell you what is realistic and how quickly it can be done.
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 attorneys, CPAs, fiduciaries, community banks, and private clients throughout Denver Metro and Boulder County.