If you own real property jointly with someone else (whether its 1 other person or several other people) you always have the right to sell your own interest in that property even if your co-owners don’t want to sell. There is a special type of court case you can file in Maryland called a partition sale action to force the sale of jointly owned property. We handle about a dozen of these cases every year, so I have a very good idea of how they usually work and what you can typically expect.

Typical Partition Sale Scenarios

Partition sales happen when 2 or more individuals are joint owners of real estate and they disagree on whether to sell the property or not. There are 2 scenarios that we see most often in partition sale cases:

1. Unmarried couples who buy property together and then break up.
2. Siblings or family members who inherit property jointly after someone dies.

Unmarried Couples Who Own Property Jointly

By far the most common scenario that we see in partition sale cases involves a boyfriend & girlfriend (or any unmarried couple) who own property jointly …. then the relationship ends and they get into a dispute about what to do with the property. Here is a typical hypothetical example of this scenario:

Jack and Jill have been dating for 3 years and they decide to move in together. Rather than rent, Jack & Jill decide to buy a house together. They purchase a new townhouse in Columbia for $500,000. Jack & Jill own the house together as “joint tenants,” which means they each have a 1/2 interest in the property. Jack & Jill make a $100,000 down payment when they buy the house and finance the remaining purchase price with a $400,000 mortgage. Jack & Jill each contribute $50,000 to the down payment and they are both named as joint borrowers on the mortgage loan.

For the first 2 years everything goes great. Jack & Jill live together in the house and split the mortgage payments and all other expenses 50/50. In year 3, however, Jack & Jill breakup. Jack moves out of the townhouse and starts living with a new girlfriend. Jack also stops contributing to the mortgage payments and other expenses for the townhouse. For the next 3 years Jill continues living in the house and paying for the mortgage, property taxes, insurance, and everything else. After 3 years, Jack gets married to his new girlfriend and they want to buy a house together. Jack contacts Jill and demands that she agree to sell the townhouse and split the sale proceeds with him 50/50. Jill refuses because she wants to keep living in the townhouse and can’t really afford to buy a new place.

In this scenario, if Jill will not agree to sell the house or buy Jack out, Jack will eventually be forced to file a partition sale action in circuit court. The sale proceeds would NOT get divided 50/50, however. Both Jack and Jill would get “credits” for the money they the each put into the townhouse. So they would both get $50,000 for the down payments they made. Once Jack left, however, Jill started paying the mortgage, taxes and insurance herself. Jill would get a credit for Jack’s 1/2 share of those payments for the 3 years after he left.

Siblings Who Inherit Property Jointly

Another common situation that often leads to partition sale actions is when siblings or other family members become joint owners of real estate after the death of a parent. Here is a hypothetical for this common scenario:

Jane, Jill, Jackie, and Jen are sisters. Their father died many years ago, leaving their mother a sole owner of a house in Annapolis worth $1 million. Jane moves into the house with the mother to take care of her for the last 2 years of her life. The mother eventually dies without a will. Under Maryland law, the 4 sisters inherit equal shares of the mother’s house. So each sister becomes a joint tenant with a 25% or 1/4 ownership share of the house.

Jane continues living in the house for a few years after the mother dies, but the other sisters want to sell the house and cash in on their interest. There is no mortgage on the house, so if it sells for $1 million each sister would get $250,000 (minus sales commissions and closing costs). Jane has the option of buying her 3 other sisters out and becoming the sole owner of the house, but she can’t qualify for the $750,000 loan that she would need in order to do that.

In this situation, the 3 sisters who want to sell the house would need to file a partition sale action against Jane (the sister who refuses to sell).

For an example of what a partition sale case looks like, see our sample partition sale complaint.