In March this year, a Georgian mahogany bookcase went under the hammer at an auction house in East Sussex. The family had paid £29,000 for it in 1989. It sold for £400.
The auctioneer told the Times the owner didn’t even want to know the estimate beforehand. You can understand why.
If you’re currently dealing with a loved one’s estate, that gap between what something cost and what it’s actually worth today can have real consequences, and not just emotional ones.
What the family thinks it’s worth isn’t always what HMRC cares about
When someone dies, the people left behind often have a strong sense of what things are worth. They remember what was paid for the dining table, or they know the sideboard has been in the family for decades. Sometimes there’s an old insurance valuation tucked away somewhere.
The problem is that none of that is particularly useful for probate. HMRC isn’t interested in what something cost in 1989, or what it meant to the family. It wants to know what it would fetch on the open market today.
And right now, for a lot of traditional furniture, that number is much lower than most people expect. Georgian and Victorian pieces (the kind that filled homes for generations) have seen values collapse as tastes have shifted and living spaces have got smaller.
The antiques market has shifted
The Times piece makes for sobering reading if you’ve grown up around traditional furniture. Auctioneers are reporting that Georgian and Victorian pieces routinely fail to sell, or go for a fraction of what they once would. A dining table from the same estate as that bookcase, originally bought for £13,000, sold for £500. Less than a flat-pack equivalent from Ikea.
The reasons aren’t complicated. Homes are smaller, tastes have changed, and younger buyers simply aren’t interested in large, formal pieces the way previous generations were.
But the market hasn’t fallen across the board. Mid-century furniture (Ercol in particular) is actively sought after. Jewellery, fine art, and certain collectables can still carry significant value. The problem, for anyone handling an estate, is that you can’t apply the same assumption to everything. Some items are worth far less than expected. Others could surprise you in the other direction.
A real example of what this looks like in practice
In 2025, we were asked to help with an estate where the initial declaration to HMRC had been submitted for just under £200,000. That figure had been put together using insurance valuations and family knowledge, both of which, as it turned out, significantly overstated what the contents were actually worth.
HMRC flagged the submission for review. We were brought in to carry out a proper valuation, and the final declared figure came in at under £50,000. The difference in inheritance tax was around £60,000.
That’s not a typical outcome, every estate is different. But it illustrates how much can rest on getting the figures right from the start.
If you’re not sure, find out
The antiques market is genuinely unpredictable right now. Auctioneers with decades of experience are being caught out. Pieces that should sell aren’t, and things written off as worthless are finding buyers. For anyone working through an estate, that uncertainty is a good reason to verify rather than assume.
A professional assessment early in the process doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive. It can save a significant amount of time, money and stress further down the line, and it means you’re making decisions based on what things are actually worth today, not what the family remembers paying for them thirty years ago.