Inherited property in joint ownership: siblings end up in court

Shared inheritance: the flat three siblings can't divide

A beach house. Three siblings. One wants to sell his third; the other two want to keep using it and, if possible, have the one leaving continue paying his share of the expenses. It's not a rare case: it's the standard script of any inheritance with shared property. The ending is also written. The one who doesn't use it ends up selling his share to a third party, and the other two discover that their new co-owner is not a sibling to argue with at Christmas dinner, but a company with its own legal team.

The approach is aimed at those who are still in time: parents alive and siblings still talking. Talk it over beforehand, it seems to say, because afterwards there's no conversation possible, only notary and court.

What is joint ownership and why it becomes a problem

Joint ownership is property held in common: the same flat belongs to several people by percentages, without the walls being able to be cut into pieces. There the first asymmetry is born. Money is divided, even if the split is unequal; a property is not. It doesn't allow division, it allows use or sale. And use only works as long as all owners want exactly the same thing.

Some recall that the legal system doesn't force anyone to remain a co-owner: the articles regulating the extinction of joint ownership are abundant. Theory says there's always a way out. Practice says that way out goes through court or selling below market.

What options does a company that buys joint ownerships offer?

There is a market with its own name: companies specializing in acquiring undivided shares. Their function is to do what the desperate heir has no time, money or desire to do: litigate. The menu they offer to the other co-owners is short.

• I sell you my share dear: the one who didn't want to pay up pays what he didn't want to pay.
• I buy yours cheap: he gets less than it was worth and gets out of the mess.
• Neither one nor the other: to court and judicial auction, where the company usually keeps the remaining shares at a bargain price.

In all three scenarios there is an identifiable loser, and it's not the one who sold first.

Can you force the sale of a house inherited between siblings?

Yes. The route is judicial: extinction of joint ownership is requested and the property is auctioned. It's the answer that appears when the conflict has no turning back. The problem is the price: in a forced auction the property is not paid at market value, and whoever didn't want to sell finds half of their house in the hands of a stranger. There are stories that drag on for years.

The legitime: why you can't leave your inheritance to whomever you want

The law limits the distribution. The legitime prevents leaving a child with nothing, even when the relationship is nonexistent, and that leaves little room for the will. The estate is computed as a whole and divided equally among heirs, regardless of who cared for whom. Not even the child who didn't show up for the funeral disappears from the picture.

That's why donations made during life are scrutinized: they are considered collatable, they count as an advance on the inheritance. When parents equalize one child so as not to wrong the other, the message they send is that of a family already calculating. Forced equality avoids lawsuits, some say. Others see in it the first symptom that the family dinner has ceased to be a dinner.

Why they fight even when the estate is small

It's almost never a large inheritance. There are families that end up at odds over a pittance. The reason is not the amount: it's the object. A bank balance is divided with a transfer and a notary. A home forces you to decide who uses it, who maintains it, who is in charge and who pays the special assessment. In that distribution there is no exact division.

To that add in-laws, divorces in between and a detail that appears late: taxes. In some regions it can be more expensive to accept than to renounce, and then the distribution becomes a settlement where affection weighs less than arithmetic.

The case of the closed flat and the invalid father

One of the most complete stories is that of an heir who works and rents in Madrid while his parents and sister occupy a rent-controlled flat in Málaga. The sister, fifty years old, has never worked. The father is invalid, unable to go out, and keeps a second flat closed with renovation pending. When the parents are gone, the rent-controlled lease vanishes and a property remains to be divided between two heirs.

The foreseeable ending is not an agreement. It's a deed. And the price of that deed is not set by the market: it's set by the first buyer with his own lawyers who appears for a share of a flat whose owners have stopped talking. No one wins, but someone gets paid.