Property valuation

The thirteenth entry is a melhor utilização possível, and it is the one line on this page that a valuer would refuse to render word for word. « The best possible use » is perfectly good English and means nothing in particular. The term the trade uses is « highest and best use », four words that always travel together and never change order. Two things make it worth learning as a block. The first is that « highest » is not a second adjective piled on top of « best »: it points at the value, while « best » points at the use that produces it, and the pair names both halves of the same finding. The second is that the phrase carries a test with it, and the test is always set out in the same four steps — the use has to be legally permissible, physically possible and financially feasible, and of those that survive it must be the most productive. Nothing in a melhor utilização possível announces any of that. The Portuguese reads as a description of a building; the English reads as a heading in a report, with an argument owed underneath it.