Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Re: Joint Tenant Partition

If you plan on forcing a sale, then you need a judgment of partition, and then the court appoints a referee, and the referee will arrange for a sale of the property. Your buyer can bid at that time.

If you want to sell to this specific buyer, then you must have an agreement with your sibling currently in place which gives you this right. I suspect that you do not. If you did, then your lawsuit is not for partition - it is for specific performance of that agreement.

Either way, you are likely looking at a long and expensive road ahead. Both types of suits are time consuming and economically expensive.

Re: Joint Tenant Partition

I would add that a fairly high proportion of partition suits are settled before final judgment. Often, the filing of the suit results in the reluctant party seeing the handwriting on the wall. Yes, you can get a judgment without a court-appointed referee, but it would be a judgment by stipulation (agreement) between the parties.

I have handled two recent partition actions in which the feuding co-owners agreed, on the eve of trial, to allow entry of a stipulated interlocutory judgment for partition by sale by ordinary commercial means (through a broker they could agree upon), with final division of the sale proceeds done in a separate binding arbitration proceeding after the results of the sale were known. The arbitrator decided the parties' remaining monetary contentions. This is somewhat faster and cheaper than a full-blown partition proceeding, and results in a better outcome at the sale. It does require some cooperation between the parties, or at least between their lawyers. The parties may still hate one another, but most co-owners will stop short of cutting off their own noses to spite the other.