In Detmold, Bad Salzuflen, Lemgo, Lage and Oerlinghausen we are there for you.

Lippe district has 349,800 inhabitants across 16 towns and municipalities. No other district in our area divides so plainly into an inside and an outside.

We are there for you in the connected north: Detmold, Bad Salzuflen, Lemgo, Lage and Oerlinghausen — the belt that adjoins Bielefeld to the west and Herford district to the north. What stays outside is the south: Horn-Bad Meinberg, Blomberg and Lügde. There our area ends, and there what we can promise ends with it.

We put this at the top of the page, not at the bottom. A district page that addresses half a district while meaning only half of it is a polite dishonesty. Where we are not the right people, we set that out in writing just as clearly as what we do take on.

Inhabitants from the population update of 31 December 2024 (IT.NRW); the inside and outside assignment from a boundary marking of 15 May 2026.

The guideline land value for residential building land is 138 euros per square metre across the Lippe district. That is the upper middle of our area. For comparison, all on the same basis: Bielefeld 381, Hanover region 298, Gütersloh 206, Herford 133, Hildesheim 120, Minden-Lübbecke 75, Schaumburg 62.

This middle position is no headline, but it has consequences. In Bielefeld the plot alone often carries the price; in rural Schaumburg almost only the building does. In Lippe both halves count — land and house, in an order of magnitude where neither hides the other. Anyone deriving the value of a Lippe house from a single number therefore misses regularly, from whichever direction they start. The neighbouring districts also pull apart in both directions: westwards the value climbs to 381 towards Bielefeld, northwards Herford sits at 133, almost level with Lippe. Anyone looking across from one district into another should therefore not transfer unchecked what they heard over there.

The remaining features stay just as even. The ownership rate has a median of 56.5 per cent: most households live in their own home, but far from all. The share of people aged 65 and over is 26.5 per cent — a good one in four. And 57.2 per cent of buildings are detached single-family houses, well over half. No value shouts; all of them point the same way: many houses here will be handed on within the coming years.

Guideline land value for residential building land across the district — a weighted mean over the 16,024 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.

The median construction year across the district is 1964. These houses were built when the children were small; today those children are grown and often live in Bielefeld, Hanover or further away. A house of that vintage usually has a staircase without an alternative, a bathroom upstairs, a heating system with a history and a roof the family has discussed at least once. None of that is a defect. It is simply what a sixty-year-old house brings with it — and these are precisely the points a community of heirs will weigh differently.

Then there is the building type. Where about half the buildings are detached single-family houses, an estate can rarely be inhabited in shares. Three siblings can own a house in thirds, but they cannot live in it in thirds. So sooner or later the question no one likes to raise first is on the table: does one person take the house on and pay out the others, or does it leave the family together. We neither postpone that question nor push towards it. We make sure it lies before everyone with the same figures attached.

What holds a community of heirs together in law we have described separately. Responsibility follows a plain rule that surprises many: what matters is the local court at the deceased person’s last place of residence, not where the house stands. Someone inheriting a house in Lemgo whose mother last lived elsewhere is dealing with a different court than expected.

Our assessment of value and condition therefore begins in the house, not in the table. And it says what it is not: no formal valuation report. An independent expert prepares that, and where one is needed, we say so.

For Horn-Bad Meinberg, Blomberg and Lügde our answer is: not us. That is not a refusal aimed at the people there but at ourselves. What we offer lives on short distances — on someone checking an empty house in the afternoon, on an appointment moving by two days without a whole trip being wasted, on a conversation at the kitchen table rather than in a video window. What we could deliver from the south of the district would be thinner guidance under the same name. We do not want to sell that.

Two cases form an exception, and neither has anything to do with where the heirs live. First: if the house stands in the north, it makes no difference whether the heirs live in Lügde, in Munich or in Canada — what counts is where the house is. Second: where an estate contains several houses and the centre of gravity lies in the north, we talk about the whole of it and say openly which part we will not accompany ourselves.

In all other cases a local address is the better one. We say so in the first conversation, not the third. Which districts belong to our area, and how far in each, is set out in the district overview; how we work in this stretch of country at all is described on the Ostwestfalen-Lippe region page.

Augustdorf · Bad Salzuflen · Barntrup · Blomberg · Detmold · Dörentrup · Extertal · Horn-Bad Meinberg · Kalletal · Lage · Lemgo · Leopoldshöhe · Lügde · Oerlinghausen · Schieder-Schwalenberg · Schlangen

Of these, Detmold, Bad Salzuflen, Lemgo, Lage and Oerlinghausen form the core of our working area in the district. Horn-Bad Meinberg, Blomberg and Lügde lie outside it. For the remaining municipalities the course of the marked area decides; if you are unsure, ask for a callback and we will settle it in two minutes rather than two weeks.

A segment classification exists in the valuation data for all 16 municipalities; the medians above are formed across exactly these 16. 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.