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A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
Executors answer to every beneficiary for the value given to a family company, a trust interest or money lent to a relative. We fix that value at the correct date, independently of every branch of the family, before anything is distributed.
Indicative valuations from A$799. Certified Summary and Detailed reports from seven business days.
A deceased estate valuation fixes the market value of a business, private company shares, a trust or partnership interest or a loan to a relative at the date of death, and at distribution where required. Gold Coast executors rely on it to administer the estate, set pre-CGT cost bases and respond to a section 41 family provision claim.
Once the Supreme Court of Queensland grants probate or letters of administration, the executor or administrator holds the estate and must later account to the beneficiaries for each asset in it. Bank balances and listed shares need no valuer; their value is a matter of record. The interests that make up most of a sizeable Gold Coast estate usually do not: shares in the family company behind a boat building yard at Coomera, units in a trust that owns a dental practice in Robina, a half share in a Bundall accounting partnership, or money advanced years ago so a daughter could buy into a Burleigh Heads cafe. Each needs a market value at a set date from someone who can show how it was reached.
If that value is wrong, the executor wears the consequence personally. Distributing on a number that cannot be supported, letting one sibling take the company for less than it is worth, or keeping no record of how a value was set can each lead a beneficiary to sue the executor to make good the loss. The complaint tends to arrive late, once someone sees what the business or the land fetched a year or two after the estate was wound up.
Families often push the other way: finish quickly, lodge the final returns and avoid anything that looks like an added expense. Measured against the disputes it prevents, a valuation is a minor cost of administration, and a properly dated figure obtained before shares or a business change hands costs far less than an amended ATO assessment, a rift between siblings or a family provision claim that feeds on the lack of any reliable number. Gold Coast estates also hold assets that are hard to price without specialist help, such as management rights in a holiday or residential complex, a short-stay letting business or a share in a hinterland tourism operator.
We work for executors, administrators and estate lawyers from Southport and Bundall to Palm Beach, Hope Island and Mudgeeraba, including estates where the Public Trustee of Queensland or a trustee company holds the appointment and wants an arm's length value on file. We do not take instructions from an individual beneficiary, which is why every beneficiary, and the Court if it comes to that, can rely on the same figure.
A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
Many estates need no formal valuation, and where one is needed it usually covers only a handful of assets. The estate lawyer settles what forms part of the estate and the date at which each item is measured; the valuer then provides a defensible market value for the items with no visible price. The request usually arises at one of four points.
The inventory, the accounts the executor gives the beneficiaries and any later claim all begin with what the deceased owned that day and what it was worth. Private company shares, partnership and trust interests, a going business, land, intellectual property, debts owed by relatives and collections each need a value fixed as at that date.
When the estate sells to a child, grandchild or sibling of the deceased, the price has not been tested in the open market and proves little by itself. A valuation obtained before the contract is signed meets any later claim of a sale at undervalue, and it is the evidence the ATO expects to see behind a price agreed between related parties.
Where one child receives the company or the business and the others take cash or the family home, comparing those parcels shows whether the will is being carried out as written. If values have shifted since the death, fairness between the beneficiaries is measured at the distribution date.
An application under section 41 of the Succession Act 1981 (Qld) asks the Supreme Court of Queensland to decide whether the will made adequate provision for the applicant. That question can only be decided once the Court knows the contents of the estate and their value, which makes the valuation expert evidence held to the Court's standard.
Sort the assets for CGT before anything else. Death does not usually trigger a capital gains tax bill, but it does fix the cost base each beneficiary inherits. Where the deceased acquired an asset before 20 September 1985, the beneficiary's cost base is its market value at the date of death, so our figure determines the taxable gain whenever it is later sold. Where the asset was acquired on or after that date, the deceased's own cost base passes across and the date-of-death value serves the administration, not the tax return. The tax adviser divides the assets into those two groups, and the depth of our work follows that split.
The deceased may have controlled a family trust completely, as appointor, as director of the corporate trustee and as the person who made every decision, yet a discretionary beneficiary owns none of the trust's property. The estate may hold only the trustee company's shares or the power to appoint a successor, not the Broadbeach apartment or the trading business inside the trust. Treating trust property as estate property is among the most expensive errors we encounter, and the estate lawyer should settle the point before the valuation is scoped.
The standard is market value: the price an informed, willing buyer and an informed, willing seller, neither under pressure, would agree at arm's length on the valuation date. A trading company or private business is normally valued mainly through the income approach, capitalising the earnings it can sustain once the accounts are normalised. We check that result through the market approach, drawing on sales of comparable businesses, while the asset approach sets the floor and leads for entities that mainly hold property or investments or that will be wound up rather than sold.
Estates raise two particular problems. One is the business whose key person is gone. If the deceased was the surgeon behind a day procedure centre near Robina Hospital, the principal who brought the clients to a Bundall law firm, or the QBCC licence holder running a building company out of Arundel, part of the earnings ended on the date of death. We separate the goodwill that stays with staff, systems, contracts and premises from the goodwill that departed with the person, and value what remained as at the date of death on what was known or reasonably foreseeable then. Trading after the death shows what was foreseeable; it does not license valuing with hindsight.
The second is a minority parcel in a family company. Sold to an outsider, a 25 per cent holding with no voice in management and no market usually attracts a discount. Passed to the sister who already holds the other 75 per cent, it delivers full control and most of the argument for a discount falls away. The report gives both values with the reasoning for each, and the executor and the estate lawyer decide which applies. If a shareholders agreement fixes a price on death, that clause may govern what the estate receives, but it does not turn the price into market value for the ATO, so both figures may be required.
When an estate reaches us already in trouble, the cause is usually one of these.
Match the report to its readers and to the chance that they will dispute it. An estate run by the Public Trustee of Queensland with every beneficiary in agreement can rest on a lighter document than one defending a section 41 application in the Supreme Court of Queensland.
Every report records the valuation date, the standard of value, the material relied on and the assumptions adopted. It then works through the approaches considered, the adjustments to the accounts, the treatment of goodwill personal to the deceased, any discount for a minority or illiquid interest, and how the approaches were reconciled to a single figure. When two numbers are required, such as pro rata and discounted values or a contract price beside market value, both appear with an explanation so the executor and the estate lawyer can apply the right one.
For a contested estate the report is prepared to comply with Chapter 11 Part 5 of the Uniform Civil Procedure Rules 1999 (Qld), which puts the expert's duty to assist the Supreme Court of Queensland ahead of any duty to the party paying. Those rules favour a single expert on an issue where that is practicable, so a report both sides can accept as balanced is worth more than one written to win. If each side retains its own expert, the certified valuer who signed will meet the other expert, contribute to a joint statement of what is agreed and what is not, and give evidence if needed. Most estates settle well before trial, usually because a credible figure was available early.
If a beneficiary takes this distribution to the Supreme Court of Queensland in several years' time, which document will show how each value was reached? If the honest answer is a guess, a rates notice or an email from the family accountant, the estate is exposed.
Talk your situation through with a certified valuer before you commit to anything, at no cost.