Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Surprisingly, the question of whether entities such as trusts can be joint tenants is not addressed in modern California law. Way back in 1852, the California Supreme Court, in its second (?? I think) year of existence, held that corporations could not be joint tenants. See De Witt v. City of San Francisco (1852) 2 Cal. 289. There is a more recent decision in Saunders v. Schmaeltze (1874) 49 Cal. 59, that may shed some doubt on the De Witt decision, but Saunders is brought into doubt itself because it is based on the common-law presumption that when two parties take title, it is as joint tenants; by statute California has subsequently adopted a contrary theory, i.e., that co-owners are tenants in common.

Therefore, I am going to opine that the correct answer is "no" for the reasons stated in De Witt in holding that corporations cannot be joint tenants.

Nevertheless, I congratulate you on bringing to LawGuru one of the most challenging questions I've seen in 10 years of answering more than 6,000 questions. I cannot say for certain that I am right.......only the Supreme Court could finally decide the issue......but it seems that entities of potentailly permanent existence, such as corporations per De Witt and trusts by analogy to De Witt, cannot be joint tenants.

Actually Whipple's analysis is wrong, though his scholarship is impressive. The problem is that trusts are not legal entities like corporations. A trust cannot own property. Only a trustee can. I do, however, agree with is conclusion for different reasons. As Whipple says, there is no authority directly on point, but I cannot think of any way a trustee could take title to property as a joint tenant without breaching their fiduciary duty to the beneficiaries of the trust. This would be true even if the trustee is the initial beneficiary, as is often the case with living trusts, because there must be successor beneficiaries upon the death of the trustee/beneficiary. Considering that the trustee would be investing the money of the trust in the property, only to lose it all to the other joint tenant if they got hit by a bus as they left the escrow closing, there is simply no way that could be a legitimate exercise of the trustee's powers.