Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Several additional questions arise that need answers or discussion before a complete and helpful answer is really possible. The questions include:

1. How is title to the property held?

2. When you use the term "partner," are you implying a true business partnership existed, or was it more of a social partnership, or perhaps both? Business partnership can arise from co-ownership of real estate, whether the co-owners intended to be partners or had any agreement to form a partnership -- but not always.

3. What's the current status of the sale? Sold and awaiting closing, on the market, or just thinking about listing? There is a way for co-owners to invoke the power of the courts to oblige the sale of property, and this results in court sipervision of the division of the net proceeds of sale. This is called a "partition" action (Code of Civil Procedure sections 872.010 et seq.). However, partition actions work best when the co-owners haven't put the property on the market yet; in fact, it's designed for situations when one or more co-owners want to sell, but one or more co-owners don't want to.

4. What is the current state of relations between you and your former partner? After seven years, maybe you've totally lost touch, maybe you're talking daily. What kind of cooperation or resistance can you expect? Have you discussed your disproportionate outlays?

5. How much equity is in the property? If it is nearly under water, there isn't much to quarrel over (except perhaps you could sue to recover your share of disproportionate outlays).

One possibility might be to give appropriate escrow instructions re release of the net proceeds. Use of a partition action is another. So might be negotiating a private agreement between the two of you, or agreeing to arbitrate the division of sale proceeds.

Please feel free to contact me with more information, and maybe I can be of further assistance. I have a mini-specialty in real-property co-ownership dispute resolution.