In Herford district we are there for you in all nine municipalities.

Herford district has 254,404 inhabitants across nine towns and municipalities. We are there for you in all nine: no place in the district is recorded as lying outside. Population figure from the population update of 31 December 2024 (IT.NRW), area marking of 15 May 2026.

That is not a slogan but a practical relief. In several of our districts every first conversation begins with the same preliminary question: is your place still inside? Sometimes the honest answer is no, and then we say so before anyone loses time — what we do not take on is set down in writing just as clearly as what we do. In Herford district that preliminary question almost always falls away. It shortens the beginning of an inheritance case by a whole step.

The second figure is just as unusual: nine municipalities for some 254,000 people. In the rural districts of our area a smaller population is spread across many times that number of municipalities. For a community of heirs this is more than an administrative note. Building files, enquiries and forms are concentrated in very few places here, and paths we learn once still hold for the next house. Where the same nine administrations keep recurring, nobody has to start from scratch each time.

Across the district 58.7 per cent of the buildings are detached single-family houses, well over half. Nine municipalities share some 249,000 people, and even so the district has no big-city character. It is a landscape of places lying close together in which most families live in a house of their own with a garden of their own.

For an estate the detached house has two very tangible consequences. The first concerns visibility. A house standing empty is noticed quickly here. The letterbox overflows, the shutters stay down, the lawn grows. Neighbours ask, well meant and uncomfortable all the same, and some calls come from people who do not want to help but to buy. Those who know this order an empty house earlier and more calmly. We have written down what to do in the first weeks, and we take on the ongoing watch for a limited period if you wish.

The second concerns divisibility. A detached house cannot be lived in by shares. Three heirs cannot each sit in a third of the living room. That is why the question in a community of heirs here almost always runs towards the same fork: one takes it over and pays the others out, or all sell together. Either is a good path once it has been spoken aloud and calculated through. It only becomes difficult when neither path is chosen for years and the postponement turns into a dispute. What happens then is set out in our text on a community of heirs and the shared house.

Herford does not stand alone. The district belongs to the Minden–Bad Oeynhausen–Herford corridor, the connected core of our working area with some 540,000 people. Six towns form it: Minden, Bad Oeynhausen, Herford, Bünde, Löhne and Vlotho. Four of them lie in Herford district, two in neighbouring Minden-Lübbecke.

For us that is a question of travel, not of the map. Within this band several appointments can be placed on one day: a check on the house in the morning, a meeting with a tradesman at midday, a conversation at the kitchen table in the afternoon. That is why we can offer guidance here that actually happens on site and not only by telephone. How we work in this part of our area is set out on the page for Ostwestfalen-Lippe.

For families living scattered, the same fact means something else: you do not have to travel in order to know what is happening to the house. We go there ourselves and report on an agreed rhythm. Anyone who would otherwise drive in from Hamburg or Munich for every appointment loses holidays to a matter that above all needs calm.

The guideline land value for residential building land is 133 euros per square metre across the district. Among our eleven districts that is a place in the upper middle: Bielefeld leads at around 381 euros, followed by the Hanover region at 298 and Gütersloh at 206; Lippe at 138 sits close beside Herford, Hildesheim at 120 just behind. After that the gap widens — Osnabrück 78, Minden-Lübbecke 75, Schaumburg and Hameln-Pyrmont 62 each, Nienburg 43.

This ranking matters in practice for heirs. In the cheaper districts almost all of a house’s value sits in the building and the plot barely counts. At 133 euros that is different: the land carries a noticeable share. Two houses in the same condition can differ here through size and shape of the plot alone. The reverse holds just as firmly: a guideline land value is an average for a zone, not the value of your plot. Multiplying it by the square metres yields a sum, but not an answer.

Two further figures belong alongside. The median construction year is 1965. These houses were built by the generation now passing them on, and they carry the questions of their building years: heating, roof, insulation, windows, often a staircase nobody likes to climb any more. And 59.0 per cent of households own their home. Where two in three households own, almost every estate is an estate with a house in it. The share of people aged 65 and over, 25.9 per cent, fits with that: more than a quarter of the district faces, sooner or later, a decision about their own home — in an inheritance case or before it, at the decision about where to live.

Guideline land value for residential building land across the district — a weighted mean over the 12,304 occupied 100-metre cells of the official guideline land value map. A Wahrgut analysis of available data; not a district figure published by a valuation committee. Share aged 65 and over, median construction year and share of detached single-family houses are likewise weighted means across the 100-metre cells of the 2022 census, each weighted by the reference its definition names. The owner-occupier rate is weighted too — by the number of households, an approximation for the dwelling count the grid does not carry. These figures do not replace the assessment of an individual house. We do not prepare a formal valuation report; that is a matter for an independent expert.

Bünde · Enger · Herford · Hiddenhausen · Kirchlengern · Löhne · Rödinghausen · Spenge · Vlotho

We work in all nine. The first step is the same everywhere: put the situation in order — who belongs to the community of heirs, what belongs to the estate, which deadlines are already running. Only once the direction is carried by everyone does it turn to value, condition and the next step. A sale stands at the end of that path, never at its beginning.

A segment classification exists in the valuation data for each of these nine municipalities. Individual place pages will follow only once enough evidenced statements exist for each — a page that merely swaps the place name helps nobody.

Why our figures can differ from others. We build a district figure from the 100-metre grid of the 2022 census: each cell counts for as many people, buildings or dwellings as it holds. That is not the same as an average across municipalities, in which the smallest village counts as much as the district town. For home ownership the difference is large: averaged across municipalities the Hanover region would come to 61 per cent — although across Lower Saxony 48 per cent of dwellings are lived in by their owners, and the state capital lies in that district. Weighted it is 45 per cent, and that matches the official figures. So we show the weighted figure — and call it a Wahrgut analysis, because we formed it ourselves and it appears in no official publication in this form.

All information is provided without warranty: we have evaluated all data to the best of our knowledge and belief, but we can make mistakes.