Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

You can approach this one of two ways. One way is to try to find a buyer for a 75% interest in the property. That might be hard to do, since you would essentially be selling your problem with the other sibling along with the property, thereby depressing the price you get. But it's not impossible, and the prospect of having a stranger investor as majority owner of the property may bring your recalcitrant sibling around to reluctantly agreeing to sell. It's also at least theoretically possible you could find a mutually acceptable investor/buyer who would be willing to manage the property and share proceeds with the reluctant sibling.

Your other alternative, and the one that is legally cleanest, is to file a court proceeding called a "partition action." When it was first created in the law, a partition was a request to the court to order a property in shared ownership divided between the owners. The court would literally order that A now owns the north half of the farm and B owns the south half, or something along those lines That was before modern subdivision and zoning laws which prevent a court from doing that. So what the courts do is partition by sale. The property is ordered sold by the sheriff, just as if it was foreclosed on. Then the proceeds are "partitioned" among the owners. If any of the owners think they have legal grounds for a larger share due to paying unequally for improvements or some other legally recognized reason for a larger share, that is decided by the court before the shares are distributed.

As you may imagine, as clean and orderly as a partition action is, it has some distinct disadvantages. One is that it takes time. Another is that just as with foreclosures, you virtually never get as much for the property as if it was properly marketed by a real estate professional. And then of course there is the problem of everyone having to pay a lot of legal fees. For these and other reasons, including the reluctant seller being confronted with the fact that a sale is now inevitable, partition actions rarely if ever get to the point of a sheriff's sale, much less a final partition proceeding. Often times the mere threat of a partition action and consultation with an attorney by the reluctant owner makes them realize that they will have to sell and may as well negotiate to get as good a deal as possible. Other times the action has to be filed and a few attorneys' bills arrive before the parties sit down and settle on a plan for an orderly sale and distribution. In 30 years of practice, however, I have never heard of a partition action going to trial.

Filing a complaint for partition makes more sense than trying to sell a 3/4 interest, for which there isn't much of a market........ I agree that most of the partition actions that are filed get settled well before they go to trial and sale, usually by an agreement to sell the property out of court or for one owner or group of owners to buy out the other(s). If you retain an attorney to bring a partition action, be sure he/she understands that your objective is to get the co-ownership undone as quickly and overall economically as possible.