Too much of a legal hassle, they argue Varya Safaryan lives adjacent to the "Firdus" marketplace in downtown Yerevan. The site is a maze of narrow streets lined with semi-enclosed stalls where vendors sell an assortment of wares. The entire area has been earmarked for sale to developers. Varya Safaryan owns a house and land here and has built a 230 square meter stall with a covered roof in the marketplace. Try as he might, municipal authorities and Armenian courts have always turned down his applications to get the commercial stall registered as his property. The case has now reached the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. Anahit Safaryan, Varya’s daughter, went to seven agencies licensed to appraise real estate to get a sense of the actual market price for the stall and the land it occupies. All of the agencies (Demarko, M&M, Artin Enterprises, Kaloria, Express SVS, Oliver Group) refused to conduct such an appraisal. Hetq also attempted to get some answers from these agencies. Only two were willing to answer our calls. Vigen Gharibyan, a specialist with Oliver Group, could only tell us that the agency doesn’t cover that area for appraisal purposes. When we asked why, he could only repeat, "We don’t." Mr. Gharibyan then said that if a resident were to come to their agency, requesting an appraisal for property in that area, they would do so. We pointed out that Anahit Safaryan had done just that and her request was refused by Oliver Group. Mr. Gharibyan said that he had no personal knowledge of the matter and advised us to contact Oliver Group Director Ara Adouryan. It turns out that Mr. Adouryan was too busy to answer our telephone call. We then asked Mr. Gharibyan if a person entered his office, seeking a property appraisal, would he travel to the property and make an appraisal. He replied that "I personally don’t do that. I just make the preparations for the director." Anahit Safaryan played us a taped conversation during which a Demarko appraiser avoided her request for an appraisal in the ‘redevelopment zone". "We have no experience doing appraisals in the zone. Property there differs from property elsewhere," the specialist said in the tape. Anahit Safrayan then suugessted that her family’s property be appraised according to normal market guidelines, but the specialist again refused, claiming that conditions were much different. Hetq made a telephone call to Demarko and spoke with Andranik Gyuzalyan, an expert appraiser. He told us that the company had never done an appraisal of property in the redevelopment zone. He said that if someone approached them with such a request they would do the job. Andranik Gyuzalyan appeared surprised when we told him that his company had refused to accept such an appraisal request from Anahit Safaryan. "That’s our business. I find it difficult to believe that we turned down such a job and the payment, preferring to sit in an empty office twiddling our thumbs. She might have misunderstood something. We would have told her such a thing," added Mr. Gyuzalyan. We also made a few calls to Express SVS, but no one answered. Anahit Safaryan played us a tape where someone from the company refused to take the job, arguing that the redevelopment zone is rife with problems. "No matter how precise and correct we write up an appraisal. Our experts will always come up against problems with the prosecutors. Your best bet is to take care of the matter yourself" – was what the Express SVS staffer had said. "In other words, you’re avoiding the job?" asks Anahit Safaryan is heard asking on the tape. "Yeah, yeah," answers the Express SVS employee.