Joint versus tenancy in common? Am I being selfish?

Hi there
I want to run something by people that are not biased.

My family are deciding how to set up the ownership of our family residence.
In general we intend to use the country residence as a place where all siblings can come and go as they chose. It’s like a mini country estate.
My sister’s husband wants “tenancy in common” to “protect his interest via his wife in case she passes on”

The property came to us all without cost inputs from anyone- apart from my upgrading with about 20k expense so far.

My response to this is “it’s not really any of your business. We initially verbally agreed on joint tenancy to prevent legal rows and keep the property in our “original family ownership”

Am I being selfish or is he?
I imagine that if it comes to a situation via “tenancy in common” that he will try to sell his share, or want to be bought out.

This goes against my desire to have it as an “original family home”
Am I being naive?

Thanks for reading J

It's not just a family home, it's a financial asset.

You say your sister's husband wants it as tenants in common, what about your sister? I can only assume she agrees. Do they have children? Or what about their future children? Why should they lose out to whoever lives longest?

What about your children?

In general a number of siblings jointly owning a property is a mess just for these problems.

@MuchMore - Just for folk that are unfamilar with the concepts - a 'joint tenancy' means that if there were say 4 involved. None would have any asset to pass on but rather the last survivor of the 4 takes the property.

Clearly for married couples this is desirable.

The Tenancy-In-Common is a share effectively and each 'share' can therefore be willed.

Clearly for what you have in mind - I can see where you might be coming from. If you happen to be considerably younger than the others - well you can see where a slight conflict might arise.

In your circumstances - would a Trust not be a better device? You would need to take legal advice - I cant really go into it here.

As much as I love my sisters, I'm not planning on bequeathing them too much in my will apart from my 1st communion pictures. Any assets I have will go to my wife and kids, which is pretty much the norm.

In this particular case, I can understand the OPs wish to keep the property in the original family but in my view a joint tenancy arrangement will never be satisfactory to his/her sisters husband.

I would be inclined to go the tenancy in common route with a side agreement among the siblings,giving rights to any surviving siblings to buy out the share of a deceased sibling from the deceased siblings estate. They could facilitate this by taking life assurance policies on each others lives to ensure that the money is available when one of them dies. I'm not sure if that type of remedy is workable or not but it sounds like it might be the fairest way of ensuring that there is something for everybody and not just a lottery of who lives longest.

Vanilla said:

It's not just a family home, it's a financial asset.

You say your sister's husband wants it as tenants in common, what about your sister? I can only assume she agrees. Do they have children? Or what about their future children? Why should they lose out to whoever lives longest?

What about your children?

In general a number of siblings jointly owning a property is a mess just for these problems.

Click to expand...

This is good advice

You all should be thinking about the long term.

You say that you verbally decided on a joint tenancy to avoid a row.
Sadly, this was never going to work. Even if you did go ahead with joint tenancy,it would only postpone the row until the day that one of you realised that they were likely to die first, so his or her kids would get nothing from the holiday home and that one that lives the longest can sell the house and get all the inheritance.

BTW, neither of you are being over-selfish, both of you are looking to get what you want out of this joint home.The difference is that you sister and her husband have thought about
the next 30 years.

Thanks for all your advice, guys, it's good to hear independent view on it

A tenancy-in-common would be the usual way to hold property of this nature. In fact, even if you set up a joint tenancy, if there is a dispute in the future, the court could well presume a tenancy-in-common and partition the shares in the property.

There will be ongoing costs with the property - property tax, maintenance, electricity etc. Would it be worth considering setting up a company to manage the property, and give shares in the company to the family members, rather than the property, and charging each a "service charge" to cover costs?

For the reason above - the active duty required to maintain the property, a trust may not be the best way of setting things up.