9 Mass. App. Ct. 877 | Mass. App. Ct. | 1980
In his appraisal of a commercial building which was over 100 years old, largely unheated, and lacking any significant modernization, the plaintiff’s expert, Frattaroli, teetered to the brink of eviden-tiary incompetence when he employed market rents in a nearby modern office building as a reference point from which to impute fair rental value to the plaintiffs’ much older premises, which the defendant had taken by eminent domain. Frattaroli employed that imputed rent in arriving at an opinion of the fair market value of the plaintiff’s premises by the capitalization of income method. Counsel for the defendant moved to strike the opinion of value offered by Frattaroli as incompetent, and the motion was denied. See Greenspan v. County of Norfolk, 264 Mass. 9, 12 (1928); Maher v. Commonwealth, 291 Mass. 343, 348-349 (1935); Boston Gas Co. v. Assessors of Boston, 334 Mass. 549, 578-579 (1956). Frattaroli salvaged his opinion, however, when he conceded that the property relied on and the property taken were not comparable, but that he “made downward adjustments [of the rents from the modern property], taking into
Judgment affirmed.