My Sister and I Could Not Agree What Our Parents' House Was Worth

The House With Both Our Childhoods In It

When our mother died, eighteen months after our father, my sister Anke and I were left with the house on the hill in Bloemfontein where we had both grown up. Three bedrooms, a stoep that caught the afternoon sun, a lemon tree our father had planted the year I was born, and a kitchen that still, somehow, smelled faintly of every Sunday lunch of my childhood. We were the only two children. There was no will fight, no drama, no long lost cousin. Just the two of us, and one house, and the enormous, unspoken question of what came next.

We agreed almost at once that neither of us would live in it. Anke had built her life in Cape Town years ago. I was settled here in the Free State but in my own place across town, with my own family and no desire to move backwards into my past. So the house would be sold, and the money split down the middle, cleanly, fairly, the way our parents would have wanted. Simple. We told each other it would be simple.

The Number That Started the Trouble

It stopped being simple the moment we started talking about the number. Anke had a figure in her head. I had a different one. Hers was high, built out of love and memory and the sunlight on that stoep. Mine was lower, built out of the fact that I actually walked past the peeling paint and the tired bathroom every time I visited, and knew what the place really needed.

We were not being greedy. That is what made it so hard. We were both being honest, and our honesties simply did not match. She thought I was undervaluing the home we were raised in. I thought she was pricing a feeling, not a house. We got an estate agent in, and he gave us a figure, and then a second agent gave us a wildly different one, and instead of settling the argument that made it worse. Now there were four numbers on the table and two sisters who were starting to look at each other the way you never want to look at your only sibling.

There was one afternoon, on the phone, where Anke went quiet and then said, very softly, that she did not want to lose me over a house. That stopped me cold. Because she was right that we were on the road to exactly that, over bricks and mortar, over a number, over the last thing our parents had left us.

Getting a Grown Up in the Room

My brother in law, who works in commercial property, said the thing that saved us. He said we were arguing about an opinion when we needed a fact. Estate agents, he explained, are trying to win a mandate to sell, so their number is part science and part sales pitch. What we needed was an independent, professional set of eyes with no stake in the answer, someone who did formal Property valuations for a living and would give us a figure grounded in evidence rather than affection or ambition.

That distinction had genuinely never occurred to me. I had thought a house was worth whatever somebody would pay, which is true on the day, but is no help at all when two grieving sisters are trying to agree in advance on what fair looks like. We arranged an independent valuation, and I sat in on the walkthrough, and it was an education. The valuer was not swayed by the lemon tree. She looked at the roof, the electrics, the comparable sales on the same hill in the same year, the direction the market had been moving. She was building a case, not telling a story.

Learning That the Market Is Bigger Than My Feelings

What struck me most was how much of it came down to information I simply did not have. I had been standing in my own memories, arguing from a sample size of one house that I happened to love. The valuer talked about the wider South African property market in a way that put our little hill in context. What homes like ours had actually sold for. How the area had held up, or not, against the rest of the city. Whether we were in a moment where buyers were plentiful or scarce.

None of it was guesswork. She kept referring to actual property data, records of real transactions, trends measured over years rather than felt over a lifetime. It was almost humbling. Anke and I had each been so certain, and here was a person calmly showing us that certainty, without evidence, is just a strong feeling wearing a suit. The number she arrived at sat between Anke's and mine, closer to the middle than either of us expected, and, crucially, it came with reasons. Pages of them.

The Phone Call That Went Differently

I phoned Anke the evening the valuation came through. I was nervous. I had spent so long defending my lower number that I half expected to have to defend it again. Instead I just read her the reasoning. Not my reasoning. The valuer's. The comparable sales, the condition notes, the market context. And I heard, down the line from Cape Town, my sister let out a long breath.

She said it was a relief to be handed something that was nobody's side. Not mine, not hers. Just the truth of the thing, as close as anyone could get to it. We accepted the figure within about ten minutes, after weeks of circling each other. It was the easiest conversation we had had about the house since our mother's funeral, and it was easy precisely because neither of us had to win. The facts had done the winning for us.

What I Would Tell Anyone Splitting a Home

The house sold a few months later, near enough to the valuation figure that I felt a quiet vindication of the whole process. A young family bought it. I drove past recently and there were children's bicycles on the stoep and the lemon tree was heavy with fruit, and I did not feel sad. I felt like the place had been handed on properly.

Here is what I took from it. When something matters emotionally, you are the worst possible judge of what it is worth, and so is the person you love who is grieving alongside you. That is not a weakness. It is just what love does to arithmetic. If you are ever standing where Anke and I stood, two people who care about each other and a shared thing you cannot agree on, do not try to out argue each other. Bring in someone whose whole job is to be right rather than to be on a side.

We nearly fell out over a number that turned out to be knowable all along. What we could not have known, we did not have to invent. We just had to ask the people who measure these things for a living, and let the evidence be kinder to us than we were being to each other.