Vacation home sharing

If you are one of the lucky ones who happens to inherit a vacation house with your siblings, it can turn out to be a traumatic experience. Sharing a place like that peacefully seems at times very difficult to do. Disagreements can flare up from a tiny issue like what to do about a bird nesting under the lakeside cottage's eaves to a larger one like who gets to visit the Las Vegas condominium on the next holiday weekend. But it doesn't have to be like that.

The sharing can be made workable, and enjoyable, with some advance planning. The original owners, usually the parents, could leave the real estate in a trust or a limited liability company and then give the heirs shares in the entity. The arrangement should also include guidelines on how to sell or transfer shares. Or the property could be left to the estate and each family member would have a right of first refusal to buy it. This is the easy part, the ownership transfer.

Now comes the hard part, when you are actually sharing the property with others. The best way to handle it is to write a formal agreement that everyone signs. Here are some of the questions that should be asked and included in it:

How will any repairs or improvements be decided and paid?

How are visiting dates allocated?

Who will maintain the property, family members or an outside contractor?

What procedure is used to resolve disputes?

How is any rent income distributed?

When someone wants out, how is that handled?

The more detailed the agreement, the less there is room for later friction. It's really worth taking the time to think of anything that might come up and put it in writing. Being pro-active usually pays off in a big way.