My mother passed away in 2001 but I recently sold a piece of rural land I inherited and need to determine basis for reporting the capital gains on my income tax this year. The problem I am finding is that there was no appraisal done of the property at the time and there are no comps that go back that far. I've talked to real estate agents, appraisers, title people, county tax office and no one keeps comps further back than 5 years and title companies are not allowed to release the amount a property sold for and the tax office might have records on how much a loan was for on a property bought but there is no way to tell what the Fair Market Value actually was because the lender could have just loaned 80%, for example, of the price of the property being sold. I don't want to use the tax appraisal district's appraised values because they are so low. Instead, I need to somehow get what a Fair Market Value would have been at that time for the property to compare to what I just sold it for to determine how much capital gains to report this to the IRS. How can I go about this with no old comps available past 5 years? Would the IRS accept copies of classified ads in the local newspaper offering similar properties for sale as documentation of a Fair Market Value figure in this case?

A professional appraiser should have records they can go to and give you a valuation.

... I don't want to use the tax appraisal district's appraised values because they are so low. ...

Such values are often called "assessed value"


It is true that such values are notoriously low. But if you know what the fair market value of the property is now, and what it is assessed at, you can come up with a ratio. Apply that ratio to the assessed value back then, and you can come up with an approximate value back then.