Practical protection also means someone checks on the house regularly, keeps the heat on through winter so pipes do not freeze, and either occupies it or arranges monitored security, since an empty house is the easiest one for an insurer to flag and the easiest one for small problems to turn into expensive ones.
Getting an accurate value early protects the estate too, because heirs deciding whether to sell or have one sibling buy out the others need a real number, not a guess, and public records or an online estimate cannot see renovations that were never permitted, which is exactly what a hand-reviewed valuation is built to catch.
Joel Dyck provides that valuation early in the process, before decisions get made on incomplete information, and coordinates with the estate's lawyer, who typically charges $800 to $1,500 for this kind of file. Get your hand-reviewed valuation from Joel Dyck.