Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Unless there is a joint operating and ownership agreement of some kind, each owner is free to sell his or her share of the mineral rights for whatever they can get for it and keep the proceeds. Likewise, each owner is entitled to sell his or her share of fee title to the property, less of course any mineral rights previously sold. This assumes, however, that they can find a buyer who wants to be partial owner with the sellers relatives. Usually that will be hard to do, and will fetch less than their share of the value of the property if sold as a whole due to the hassle factor and unknowns of buying into co-ownership. The only situation in which that really works is where Tenant In Common (TIC) ownership of small apartment buildings has been used to get around condo-conversion limitations in cities without enough apartment stock.

The only other way to sell it is by agreement of the owners to sell the whole thing or subdivide it, or court order. The law allows co-owners to force a sale of their co-owned property. The proceeding is called a partition action, because before modern zoning and subdivision laws the courts actually just divided parcels into sub-plots. Now partition is done by sheriff's sale and dividing the proceeds. Since the litigation just costs everyone money, and a sheriff's sale never brings in as much as a proper real estate listing and sale process, partition actions are rarely filed, only threatened, and in the few cases where they are filed they almost always quickly result in a negotiated agreement for either a buy-out or a cooperative sale of the property.