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Refresher: How to Think About Co-ownership

3 min

We've consistently compared home co-ownership to a business partnership. It's a helpful analogy for thinking about how to successfully manage co-ownership—everything that happens after the purchase closes. As with a business partnership, co-ownership involves:

👩🏽‍🦱👨🏼‍🦰🧓🏽 Multiple parties: friends, family, partners

💰 Joint investment: financial capital, social capital, time, energy

🤝 Shared interests: asset/liabilities, risks, rewards

Success involves total return on investment of cash, relationships, and more, over the complete lifespan of your co-ownership arrangement. To get there, we have to manage the various moving parts:

→ Social aspects: interpersonal relations and interactions

→ Financial aspects: expenses, payments, taxes, accounting

→ Legal aspects: structure, documentation, compliance

→ Operational aspects: day-to-day management of the home

→ Risk: identification, mitigation, remedies

Co-ownership is a joint venture with many dimensions, which are all related.


Of course, this is a broad grouping. It's not exhaustive, but it's an excellent starting point to break things down.