Cite as: 511 U. S. 531 (1994)
Souter, J., dissenting
reading of the statute is as easy as statutory interpretation is likely to get. On the majority's view, laying waste to this straw man necessitates accepting as adequate value whatever results from noncollusive adherence to state foreclosure requirements. Because properties are "simply worth less," ante, at 539, on foreclosure sale, the Court posits, they must have been "worth" whatever price was paid. That, however, is neither a plausible interpretation of the statute, nor its only remaining alternative reading.2
2 The majority's statutory argument depends similarly heavily on the success of its effort to relegate "fair market value" to complete pariah status. But it is no short leap from the (entirely correct) observation that a property's fair market value will not be dispositive of whether "less than a reasonably equivalent value" was obtained on foreclosure to the assertion that market value has "no applicability," ante, at 537, or is not "legitimate evidence," ante, at 549 (emphasis added), of whether the statutory standard was met. As is explored more fully infra, the assessed value of a parcel of real estate at the time of foreclosure sale is not to be ignored. On the contrary, that figure plainly is relevant to the Bankruptcy Code determination, both because it provides a proper measure of the rights received by the transferee and because it is indicative of the extent of the debtor's equity in the property, an asset which, but for the prebankruptcy transfer under review, would have been available to the bankruptcy estate, see infra, at 562-565.
It is also somewhat misleading, similarly, to suggest that "[n]o one would pay as much," ante, at 539, for a foreclosed property as he would for the same real estate purchased under leisurely, market conditions. Buyers no doubt hope for bargains at foreclosure sales, but an investor with a million dollars cash in his pocket might be ready to pay "as much" for a desired parcel of property on forced sale, at least if a rival, equally determined millionaire were to appear at the same auction. The principal reason such sales yield low prices is not so much that the properties become momentarily "worth less," ibid. (on the contrary, foreclosure-sale purchasers receive a bundle of rights essentially similar to what they get when they buy on the market) or that foreclosing mortgagees are under the compulsion of state law to make no more than the most desultory efforts to encourage higher bidding, but rather that such free-spending millionaires are in short supply, and those who do exist are unlikely to read the fine print which fills the "legal notice" columns of their morning newspaper. Nor, similarly, is market value justly known as the "antithesis" of
551
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