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Evidence Required to Substantiate Value of Marital Assets
© 2005 National Legal Research Group, Inc.
CONNECTICUT: Brycki v. Brycki, 91 Conn. App. 579, 881 A.2d 1056 (2005)
Both parties offered flawed values for a piece of marital real property, and the husband failed to submit an affordable third-party appraisal, even after the trial court suggested that more evidence was needed to reach a reliable value. Given these facts, the trial court did not err as against the husband by valuing the property at one-half of the husband's valuation, even though that valuation was not supported by any specific evidence. The wife did not waive her interest in the property by failing to value it on her financial statement, where she submitted a single combined value for it and an adjacent property.
Among the parties' various marital assets was a piece of real property containing a home and a stone quarry. The wife valued the property at $350,000, the amount which the parties had previously paid to purchase the property. The husband valued the property at $1.2 million, by adding the value of the land to the value of the stone available to be removed from the quarry.
The trial court initially divided the marital estate without valuing the property in question. Upon a motion for articulation of its findings, the trial court stated:
[I]t's my recollection . . . that this was a fairly even distribution because of the existence of the $350,000 mortgage that would still remain on the [quarry] property. And my recollection is that . . . [the] Black Ash property was . . . worth over $300,000, so that would give him an equity of over $200,000. And I don't know what the [quarry] property, no one seems to know what that's worth . . . if it's worth $600,000 and she has a $350,000 mortgage, she's only getting $250,000. So, to me that seems like a pretty even distribution of the marital assets.
91 Conn. App. at 589-90, 881 A.2d at 1062.
The husband appealed, arguing first that the wife waived any interest in the quarry by failing to value it on her pretrial financial statement. The appellate court found that the wife had listed the home and quarry together as a single asset, valued at $350,000. The husband had given individual values for the home and the quarry, but the fact that he did so did not force the wife to do so as well. Thus, the wife had valued the quarry on her pretrial financial statement.
The husband's real complaint was that the trial court had rejected his $1.2 million value, and arbitrarily suggested that the property was worth only $600,000. While no evidence specifically supported the $600,000 value, the trial court's rejection of the husband's value was still well-founded:
Although it would have been preferable for the court to place a more specific value on the quarry property, in light of all the evidence adduced at trial, we can find no fault with the court's failure to do so. On the first day of trial, when both the plaintiff [husband] and the defendant [wife] testified as to the value each placed on the quarry property, the court repeatedly stated that it needed more information, and preferably an expert opinion, regarding the quarry property's value. The court also found the plaintiff's valuation of the property disingenuous in light of the fact that (1) the parties were the highest bidders when the property was sold on the open market and (2) the plaintiff, in order to obtain the property without putting it up for sale, was willing to pay the defendant only $135,000 for her share. Furthermore, although the plaintiff claimed that the quarry property was worth upward of $1 million, he either was unable or unwilling to pay $5000 for an appraisal of the property.
91 Conn. App. at 590, 881 A.2d at 1062-63. A valuation based upon expert testimony would have been preferable, but the absence of such a valuation was not the trial court's fault:
After the land surveyor testified but prior to the close of the plaintiff's evidence, the court indicated that it had not received from the land surveyor a sufficient estimate of the quarry's worth in order to place a value on the property. Specifically, the court stated that the land surveyor's testimony did not "indicate any value of" the property. Thereafter, without presenting any more expert testimony regarding the value of the quarry, the plaintiff rested.
The court gave the plaintiff and the defendant ample opportunity to provide it with evidence of the property's value. The parties failed to do this, and so the court estimated a value of the property for purposes of distributing the marital assets. This estimate was not without reason or basis in the evidence that the court did have before it. We cannot say, therefore, that the court's finding that the property's value was about $600,000 was clearly erroneous.
91 Conn. App. at 591, 881 A.2d at 1063 (court's emphasis). The trial court's valuation of the quarry was therefore affirmed.
Editor's Comment: The trial court's arbitrary assumption that the property was worth one-half of the husband's value is troubling, for it was not supported by any real evidence. See, e.g., Torres v. Torres, 883 So. 2d 839, 841 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2004) ("[W]e caution the [trial] court that a valuation based on the average of the difference in the parties' valuation is not a valuation based on the evidence"); Solomon v. Solomon, 861 So. 2d 1218, 1221 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2003) ("It appears from the record that the trial court split the difference between the valuations offered by the parties to arrive at the figure in the final judgment. This is improper"). But there was ample reason to reject the husband's valuation, and the husband failed to submit an appraisal, even though the cost would have been only $5,000, a very small fraction of the value of the property. The trial court specifically gave the husband an opportunity to produce an appraisal, and the husband did not do so. Under these specific circumstances, the husband was not in any position to complain about the trial court's valuation.
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