The Changing Face of Platonic Co-Ownership of Real Estate

Anyone with a successful marriage will tell you that one of the key ingredients is to treat each other as business partners with regard to financial matters, even if you agree that each spouse also has a separate bank account for fun splurges or for financially supporting his or her own blood relatives and they agree not to give each other a hard time about those accounts. People who marry later in life tend to be more successful at this. Of course, spouses are not the only people with whom you can jointly own property. More than a third of jointly owned houses are owned by parents and their child or children, two or more siblings, or two or more business partners who own the house as an investment. An increasing number of people are buying houses jointly with platonic friends or would like to do so. Owning your house with a friend can work well, but only if you straighten out all the legal details. To find out more about how you and your buddies can buy a house together without ruining your friendship, contact a Washington, D.C. real estate lawyer.
Carefully Written Legal Agreements Are the Key to a Successful Experience of Joint Homeownership With a Platonic Friend
Millennials may not care for dinner napkins, but they appreciate friendship as much as they appreciate avocado toast. They have also lived in difficult economic circumstances for most of their lives. Most millennials will never be able to afford to buy a house unless their parents were homeowners; these transactions often involve a cash gift from the parents to put toward the down payment.
This leaves most of a generation renting housing. The Millennials who don’t live with their parents in multigenerational households often live with roommates. They also have lower marriage rates than previous generations. Against this backdrop, buying a house jointly with one or more friends makes sense. It costs less money and fewer natural resources to operate one household than four.
Buying the house is not the hardest part. The process is the same when friends buy a house and live in it as when business partners buy a house and rent it out. The agreements need clauses about the transfer of each partial owner’s share. Do the roomies have the right of first refusal if one of them wants to sell her share of ownership in the house to someone else? Do they get first dibs on buying out her share before she can sell it to a newcomer? Assuming everything works out, you and your co-homeowners should be on the same page about inheritance of shares of ownership in the house, and your will should match the agreement you sign with the co-owners.
Contact Tobin O’Connor Ewing About Buying a House With Your Friends
A Washington, D.C. real estate attorney can help you prevent conflict when you buy a house jointly with your friends and live in it together. Contact Tobin, O’Connor, and Ewing in Washington, D.C. or call 202-362-5900.
Source:
housebeautiful.com/design-inspiration/real-estate/a60333639/why-i-want-to-buy-a-home-with-my-friends/