Stanley Blake started Blake Appraisal Service in St. George in 1972, when the city was still a small Mormon farming-and-pioneer town and the appraisal segment ran on a handful of generalist licenses. More than fifty years later, five Blakes are working in the firm — Stanley, his brother Kelly, and the next generation, Kyle, Neil, and Quinn — across two generations under one roof. That is unusual in any professional category and especially in appraisal, where the credentialing barrier alone usually slows family succession to a trickle.
Five family appraisers, one office
The depth of experience compounds in a way that matters for the harder work in this category. A firm with five family appraisers across two generations carries decades of localized knowledge about Washington County property — historical sales patterns, the shape of older estates, the way Bloomington’s lot lines actually settled, the difference between a Coral Canyon comparable and a Sand Hollow comparable. For older inherited properties, complex estates, and litigation work, that local-knowledge depth is part of what gets a valuation to hold up under cross-examination.
Downtown St. George, next to the courthouse
The office on East 100 South is in central downtown St. George, a few blocks from the Washington County Courthouse. The adjacency is operationally useful for the kind of work the firm does — divorce, probate, and contested-valuation cases all live near the courthouse infrastructure, and being walking-distance to opposing counsel and the clerk’s office is a real workflow benefit.
A multi-generational anchor
Fifty-plus years continuously operating, two generations of family appraisers, downtown courthouse-adjacent office — this is the kind of long-tenured Southern Utah appraisal firm a 435 register specifically wants to make findable.