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A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
When a Hunter business owner dies, the executor inherits the job of putting a defensible number on the family company, the trust interest or the money lent to a son or daughter. We provide that number at the right date, signed by a certified valuer who acts for the estate rather than any one beneficiary, before a single asset changes hands.
Indicative valuations from A$799. Certified Summary and Detailed reports from seven business days.
An estate valuation states what a business, company shares, a trust or partnership interest or a loan to a relative was worth at the date of death, and at distribution if needed. Executors across Newcastle and the Hunter use it to account to beneficiaries, settle pre-CGT cost bases and answer family provision claims under the Succession Act 2006 (NSW).
After the Supreme Court of New South Wales grants probate or letters of administration, the executor holds the estate's assets for the beneficiaries and has to account for each one. A bank balance or a parcel of listed shares values itself. The assets that carry the weight in many Hunter estates do not: shares in a family electrical contracting company at Beresfield, units in the trust behind a vineyard and cellar door business at Pokolbin, a half interest in a Charlestown accounting partnership, or a sum lent years ago to help a son buy a house in Maitland.
Each of those needs a market value at a fixed date from someone who can show their working. If the figure turns out to be wrong, the loss can fall on the executor personally, not on the estate. Hand a sibling the company for less than it was worth, or distribute on a number nobody can explain, and an unhappy beneficiary may pursue the executor for the difference, often years later when the business sells for more.
Families usually want the estate finished quickly and cheaply, and a valuation can look like one more bill. Set against what it prevents, it is a small cost: an amended ATO assessment, a falling-out between brothers and sisters, or a family provision claim that gains ground because nobody ever fixed a reliable number.
We work for executors, administrators and estate lawyers across Newcastle, Lake Macquarie and the wider Hunter, by video call and phone, including estates where NSW Trustee and Guardian holds the grant and wants an arm's length figure on its file. We take no instructions from an individual beneficiary, so every beneficiary, and the Court if it comes to that, can rely on the same report.
A certified valuer will listen to your situation and answer any questions you may have, at no cost.
Plenty of estates need no formal valuation at all, and those that do usually need one for only a few assets. The estate lawyer decides what belongs to the estate and the date each asset is measured at; our job is a defensible market value for the assets nobody can look up. Requests tend to arrive at one of four moments.
Everything starts here. The inventory, the executor's accounts to the beneficiaries and any later claim all rest on what the deceased owned that day and what it was worth, so private company shares, trust and partnership interests, a trading business, land, intellectual property, money owed by family members and collections each need a figure at that date.
When one child takes the business or the shares and the others take cash or the house, comparing the portions shows whether the will is being carried out as written. If values have moved since the death, fairness between the shares is tested at the date of distribution, so a second figure may be needed.
A sale from the estate to a relative never meets the open market, so the agreed price proves little by itself. A valuation in hand before contracts are exchanged answers a later complaint of undervalue and gives the ATO the market evidence it looks for behind a related-party price. Where land changes hands, Revenue NSW may also look at the value behind the price under the Duties Act 1997 (NSW).
Under Chapter 3 of the Succession Act 2006 (NSW), an eligible person can ask the Supreme Court's Equity Division to order provision from the estate for their proper maintenance, education or advancement in life. The Court cannot weigh that request without knowing what the estate holds and what it is worth, so the valuation becomes expert evidence and must be written to that standard.
Classify each asset for CGT before the scope is set. A death does not usually create a capital gains tax bill by itself, but it decides the cost base each beneficiary takes over. For an asset the deceased acquired before 20 September 1985, the beneficiary's cost base is its market value on the date of death, so our figure sets the taxable gain whenever it is eventually sold. For an asset acquired on or after that date, the deceased's own cost base carries over and the date-of-death figure serves the administration rather than the tax return. Your tax adviser sorts the assets into those two groups, and the depth of our work follows the split.
The deceased may have controlled the family trust in every practical way, as appointor, as a director of the trustee company and as the one who made every call, yet a discretionary beneficiary owns nothing in the trust. What passes through the estate may be only the shares in the trustee company or the power of appointment, not the investment property or the trading business the trust holds. Treating trust property as estate property is one of the costliest errors we see, and in New South Wales the family provision rules can, in some circumstances, reach property that passed outside the will, so the estate lawyer should settle both questions before we scope the work.
We measure market value: the price an informed buyer and an informed seller, both willing and neither forced to deal, would agree at arm's length on the valuation date. For a private company or a trading business the income approach usually carries most weight, capitalising the earnings the business can sustain once its accounts are normalised. The market approach checks that answer against sales of comparable businesses, while the asset approach sets the floor and takes the lead for an entity that mainly holds property or investments, or that is to be wound up.
The first problem is a business that has lost the person at its centre. Think of the surgeon whose referrals kept a private clinic near John Hunter Hospital at New Lambton Heights busy, or the licensed electrician whose name won a Mayfield contracting company its maintenance work at the port and the mines. Some of the earnings stopped with them. We separate the goodwill that stays with staff, systems, contracts and premises from the goodwill that left, and value what remained at the date of death on what was known or reasonably foreseeable then; later trading is evidence of what was foreseeable, not permission to use hindsight.
The second problem arises when the estate holds a minority stake in a family company. Offered to a stranger, a one-third stake with no say over management and no ready buyer would normally carry a discount. Left to the brother who already owns the other two-thirds, it hands him full control, and most of the argument for a discount disappears. We report both values with reasons and the executor and estate lawyer choose; where a shareholders' agreement sets a price on death, that clause may decide what the estate receives, but it does not make the price a market value in the ATO's eyes, so both figures may be needed.
Estates that come to us already in difficulty can nearly always trace the trouble to one of these.
Pick the report by who will read it and how hard they are likely to push. A modest estate where every beneficiary agrees needs a lighter document than one answering a family provision claim in the Supreme Court's Equity Division, where the other side's expert will go through it line by line.
The report opens with what a reviewer checks first: the valuation date, the standard of value, the records we relied on and the assumptions we made. The body shows how the business was valued and why, including how goodwill tied to the deceased was separated out and whether a minority or hard-to-sell holding was discounted. If the estate needs two numbers, for example a contract price and a market value, or a pro rata and a discounted value, both are given and each is explained.
In a contested estate the report is prepared under the court's expert evidence rules and the Expert Witness Code of Conduct, so the valuer's first duty is to the Court and not to whoever pays the fee. Family provision claims in New South Wales are heard in the Equity Division of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, which sits in Sydney. The certified valuer who signed the report will confer with the other side's expert, help prepare a joint report on what is agreed and what is not, and give evidence if asked. Most claims settle before any hearing, and an early, credible valuation is often the reason.
Suppose a beneficiary challenges this distribution three years from now. Which document shows how each value was reached? If the honest answer is an estimate, a rates notice or an email from the family's accountant, fix that before the assets leave the estate.
Talk your situation through with a certified valuer before you commit to anything, at no cost.