Contents

This issue includes five articles, continues the Recent Court Decisions survey and Foundations, and introduces two new departments, Comparative Practice and Protocols. The survey, our largest section, reviews recent developments in property valuation law across accessible jurisdictions, referencing each jurisdiction’s primary sources where they could be reached and consulting the original language when needed.

The survey covers eighty-four jurisdictions, counted only when an installment addresses that jurisdiction’s law, the jurisdictions of the Caribbean installment counted together as one. It examines legal materials in thirty-six source languages and uses machine translation for thirty-five. The journal publishes in twelve languages.

The article entitled The Languages of Valuation Law looks at the way in which reading laws in their original language shows the evolution of legal concepts. The article Comparison of International Valuation Standards looks at the various standards systems, points out that, in contrast to the RICS Red Book, there are no comprehensive practice standards in the case of U.S. real estate valuation and includes an appendix which lists the relevant standard for each jurisdiction. The article Toward Valuation Engineering Protocols states that although professional standards set out ethics, scope of work, the recognized approaches and reporting, they give only limited advice regarding the development, testing and validation of quantitative methods and suggests protocols as a means of filling this gap. The article The Curious Case of Brazilian Valuation Engineers examines why Brazil treats the valuation of real property as engineering, reserved to professionals registered in engineering, architecture and agronomy, and compares that arrangement with Germany’s. Finally, Architectural Style as Evidence presents an ontology which records a house’s architectural character along four axes and makes a distinction between association and entailment in the case of style descriptions.

Foundations carries on with its analysis of data-driven insights, with four new entries on the statistics behind appraisal models (Conditional Expectation, Omitted Variable Bias, Endogeneity and Parameter Identification), and four new entries concerning recurring legal concepts: the scheme (in United States practice, the project) and its effect on value, the purposes of valuation, the terminology used in different jurisdictions, and the basis and approach to value. The new department, Protocols, begins its work with a draft procedure for proposing, reviewing, and publishing the Journal’s protocols, which are made available for feedback, and readers are encouraged to take part in this process. The new department Comparative Practice opens with an ontology of who may sign a value opinion in 134 jurisdictions.

The survey cautions when giving its findings. It looks at the way the law establishes the value of interests in real property, covering compulsory acquisition (in the United States, eminent domain or condemnation), private sales, judicial auctions, rent determinations, transfer tax assessments, and damages in the case of defective buildings.

Regarding the focus of the material: compulsory acquisition is given particular attention in the subsequent sections since judgments and official records relating to such cases are available, whereas information about regular sales or partitions is less accessible. The Recent Court Decisions department is aware of this imbalance and, where it can do so, remedies it by looking into sources such as Kenya’s Environment and Land Court and Nigeria’s Supreme Court, which provide reports on ordinary market transactions.

Across the jurisdictions surveyed, how compensation for a taking is fixed varies more widely than any single proposition covers, both in what such a taking must pay and how that figure is reached. Legal systems differ based on the value they require. South Africa’s Expropriation Act of 2024 (assented to in December 2024 but not yet in force)¹ will make market value one of five statutory considerations and weight none of them. Nigeria’s Land Use Act² confines compensation for developed land to unexhausted improvements — the remaining, not-yet-consumed value of what the holder has added to the land (buildings, clearing, planted crops). In United States terms, these correspond to the depreciated replacement cost of the improvements; for the land itself the Act allows at most a refund of the year’s ground rent. Sweden and Finland require, as the general rule, market value plus a statutory twenty-five percent.³ Legal systems also differ, separately, on the approach a valuer (appraiser) may use to reach that figure. For buildings and other improvements, Nigeria mandates replacement cost less depreciation and forecloses the other two approaches. Poland admits the cost approach (yielding a statutory replacement value) only where property of the kind, use or designation does not trade, or where another statute so requires.⁴ Value definitions can also differ by purpose. For its recurrent property tax, Germany uses a statutorily defined tax value, the Grundsteuerwert, income-capitalization-based for residential property under the federal model (Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg, Hamburg, Hesse and Lower Saxony use area or land-value models), while expropriation compensation is measured by market value.⁵ Legal systems also differ on the valuation date. India and Pakistan have held that where the State delays, the date moves forward and the State bears the intervening rise in prices.⁶ Türkiye, in takings without a formal expropriation process, fixes value at the date the owner’s action is filed.⁷ Egypt’s Court of Cassation held, in a decision reported in June 2026, that a claim for compensation for expropriation without due procedure is not subject to any limitation period — in the civil-law sense, it never prescribes (never becomes time-barred).⁸

The common thread is not a shared answer, but rather that reconciliation between approaches, previously treated in Foundations as an exercise of professional judgment, is determined by statute in a number of jurisdictions. Legislatures reach different conclusions about how a valuer should proceed.

There are two developments in the Americas which lie at the edge of this question. Quebec, from December 2023, replaced its value-to-the-owner measure with market value.⁹ Sweden (in 2010) and later Finland (in 2025) went beyond market value with their twenty-five percent. Ontario provides compensation on four heads, a head of compensation being a separate category of loss for which compensation is payable, one of which is market value.¹⁰ In British Columbia a court has ruled that Aboriginal title (the land rights of an Indigenous people recognized in Canadian law) extends to land held in fee simple, the ground being that the Land Title Act does not offer protection to the registered interest against such a claim.¹¹ The Land Title Act is a Torrens-registration statute whose central principle is indefeasibility: the idea that the register itself is generally conclusive as to title. The decision, which is currently under appeal, raises a question applicable to every basis of value discussed here: whether the register shows what is owned.

The Foundations and Recent Court Decisions sections were developed independently, but they eventually converged on a similar focus. The Foundations section covers what can be learned from data, such as what regression estimates are and when a parameter is identified (can be pinned down by the data at all); the Recent Court Decisions section examines what legal systems consider a defensible valuation. Regarding Parameter Identification (F10), it is argued that if, among the comparables, a relevant characteristic does not vary apart from the others, its contribution cannot be identified. The remedy lies in different data or a narrower claim, not in more complex adjustments. The Supreme Court of India reached a similar result under the statute: a sale deed for residential land cannot be used as evidence of the value of industrial land, because the Act requires sales of a similar type of land — however carefully the deed might be adjusted.¹²

It is necessary to make clear what this issue does not cover.

The survey only covers those jurisdictions for which we were able to obtain the main law, in the official text or a reliable reproduction, and presents the instruments exactly as they are written; it does not warrant how these instruments are applied in practice. In some cases, jurisdictions are represented by statute and by established practice rather than by a decision from the survey period, and this is indicated accordingly.

Some of the entries are based on secondary sources rather than on official reports and are clearly marked in such cases. In instances where the material was read from a translation, we include a citation and provide a link to the original-language source as it was confirmed at the time of going to press. Please do not base your conclusions entirely on our English descriptions.

Various jurisdictions have been omitted from the survey for particular reasons: in some cases because of authoritarian governments and the unavailability of court records, for example China, Hong Kong, and Belarus; in other cases because there is no accessible primary law, such as in Turkmenistan and, in this issue, Suriname, where the expropriation statute could not be obtained; and in some instances since they have not yet been surveyed, including Vietnam, the other Central Asian states, and Iran.

The items are all made available open access under the CC BY 4.0 license, in both PDF and HTML format, together with a Crossref DOI, and are also independently stored on Zenodo. We would like to receive articles, Foundations entries, correspondence, and feedback from appraisers, attorneys, economists, and engineers. In particular, we value corrections sent to us by practitioners who work in the jurisdictions that we surveyed remotely.

References