Global · 7 min read · Laddered Editorial · 26 Mar 2026
What to Include in a Property Co-Ownership Agreement
The agreement between co-owners is the document most people skip and later wish they hadn't. Here's what belongs in it, and why each clause earns its place.
- agreements
- legal
- co-ownership
- property
This article is general information only and is not legal, financial, tax, or property advice. Consider advice from a qualified professional for your circumstances.
The contract that protects you from each other
When you co-buy, you sign a stack of paperwork: the sale contract, the mortgage, the title transfer. Almost all of it governs your relationship with the seller and the lender. Hardly any of it governs your relationship with the people you're buying *with* — which is the relationship most likely to be tested.
That's what a co-ownership agreement is for. Not because you distrust each other. Because incomes change, cities change, partners change, and a good agreement decides the hard questions while everyone is still calm and on the same side. Here's what it should cover, and why.
Ownership shares, written down properly
Start with who owns what, because that one number drives nearly everything else: how costs split, how sale proceeds divide, whose vote carries weight.
In most common-law jurisdictions you'll hold the property as either joint tenants — equal shares, with the survivor automatically inheriting — or tenants in common, where each person holds a defined percentage they can leave to whomever they like. For co-owners who aren't a married couple, tenants in common is usually the right structure. It lets shares be unequal and lets each person deal with theirs independently. Confirm the choice with a solicitor in your jurisdiction; the wrong one is expensive to unwind.
The money: in and ongoing
Record the upfront contributions — deposit, stamp duty or transfer tax, legal fees — and decide what unequal contributions *mean*. Are they reflected in the ownership percentages, or treated as a loan from one owner to another with real repayment terms? Both are fine. Leaving it ambiguous is not.
Then the ongoing side: who pays the mortgage, how the regular bills split, and how you'll handle the repair nobody saw coming. A shared account with agreed monthly contributions is worth naming explicitly — we cover how to structure that here.
Who decides, and how
Not every decision deserves the same process, so tier them. Renewing the insurance or approving a $200 plumber can be left to any owner up to a set dollar limit. A renovation or a new tenant should need a majority. Selling, refinancing, or borrowing against the property should need everyone.
One detail people miss: define what "majority" means when ownership is uneven. A majority by headcount and a majority by ownership share can point in opposite directions, and you do not want to discover that mid-argument.
Use, upkeep, and the things that quietly cause fights
If it's a holiday place, decide how time gets allocated before anyone books. First-come-first-served reliably breeds resentment around the good weeks; a booking system with blackout periods over peak season heads it off. If owners can rent out their share or the whole place, say whether that's allowed and how the income is shared.
For maintenance, agree a simple loop — propose, get sign-off, do the work, log the cost — and decide in advance whether the owner who funds improvements gets credit for them when you eventually sell.
The clause everyone skips and later needs
The exit terms are the most important part of the agreement and the part most likely to be missing. At minimum, cover the right of first refusal (an owner selling their share offers it to the others first), what happens when owners can't agree on whether to sell at all, how a buyout is valued, and how long the buying side has to raise the money.
Without these, an owner who wants out is left with one real option: forcing a sale through the courts. It's slow, it's costly, and it tends to end the relationship along with the arrangement. The agreement exists to make leaving cleaner than that. The same logic runs through how disagreements get handled day to day.
Don't forget death, incapacity, and insurance
With tenants in common, a deceased owner's share passes by their will — which means the property could suddenly involve an estate, a surviving partner, or adult children. Address that scenario and cross-reference everyone's estate planning. Do the same for incapacity: who can act, and on what authority. And set a minimum insurance standard, with every owner named on the building policy and someone clearly responsible for keeping it current.
Draft all of this yourself as a starting point if you like — Laddered helps you structure it — but have a property lawyer review it before anyone signs, ideally with each owner taking their own advice. A few hundred to a couple of thousand dollars now is cheap next to a dispute later. Sort it while the relationship is strong. You negotiate from a much weaker position once one has started.