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Co-ownership is the mother of disputes (Roman law maxim)

Buying property can be an excellent investment, but it can also be expensive. So sometimes it makes a lot of sense to share the financial burden with someone else. Perhaps for example you are spouses or life partners buying your first home. Perhaps you are a group of families planning to share a holiday house, or two firms looking to co-own business premises.

Just be very careful here…

What can go wrong?

Co-ownership (or “joint ownership” – it’s the same thing) always starts off all fine and friendly. You’re life partners, or business partners, or best friends (you may even be all of those things together) and all is good between you. So nothing can go wrong, right?

Unfortunately it can, and as many bitterly fought court cases can attest, it does. “The sting’s in the tail” as the old proverb has it, and problems tend to raise their ugly heads only down the line, long after you first became joint owners. Imagine a scenario where you can’t agree on how to run the property and/or cover its expenses, or you need to wind up your co-ownership but can’t agree on how to do so. What happens if one of you wants to buy the other out but the other refuses or you can’t agree on a fair price? Or if (as co-owners are entitled to do if not bound to a contrary agreement) they sell their share/s to a total stranger? Or the time may come when you need to/want/must sell your share and your co-owner refuses to cooperate.

The issue here is that when you are co-owners of property you don’t each hold separate title to your own physically-delineated “share”. Your title deed (registered in our Deeds Office) will reflect each co-owner as holding an undivided share in the property. You have to act jointly or call in the lawyers.

A great deal of unhappiness and dispute – perhaps even the cost, delay and hassle of litigation – beckon. For example, a court can order one of you to buy the other out, or to subdivide the property, or even to order its sale (commonly by public auction) – but it really is a last resort to ask a court to decide what is best for you.

A simple solution and a checklist for you

The trick of course is as always to plan ahead. Before you buy the property, take advice on the best structure to use for your particular circumstances. Factors to bear in mind would include things like ease of ownership, cost of ownership, the tax angle, ultimate disposal, estate planning, asset security, protection from creditors, and so on.

A whole multitude of factors, unique to each situation, will determine whether you should own the property in a legal entity like a company or trust, or register it in your names jointly, or find some other way of ensuring that you share equally in both the costs and the benefits of property ownership.

Critically, you need to put in place a written, signed agreement setting out as clearly and as simply as possible –

• Your agreed method of ownership, and whether your undivided shares will be 50/50 or in another proportion.
• Who will cover what expenses, and how? Think about all the transfer costs, the moving costs, the costs of municipal services, maintenance costs, bond instalments, and so on. If it’s an office held by a company for example, what rental will each of you pay? Who will pay the rates? Can co-owners make improvements to the property and if so how will they be compensated?
• If you are trading with the property (perhaps letting it out to tenants), will you share profits and losses in the same proportion as your shares?
• Who will attend to administrative duties? You need to cover things like paying the bond, arranging insurance, keeping financial records, dealing with tenants, and the like.
• Who will enjoy what benefits of the property, and how? In an office-sharing scenario for example, define exclusive-use and common-use areas, who gets the best undercover parking etc. If it’s a holiday home, who gets to use it and when? Who gets the Summer Holidays each year? If you are a life partnership couple you should have a cohabitation agreement in place anyway – if you don’t, ask your lawyer to draw one up for you and to integrate your co-ownership deal into it.
• Last, but certainly not least, you have to plan for the end game part. Without an agreement to the contrary, a co-owner can sell his/her share without the other’s consent – a recipe for dispute. And if your relationship falls apart, you need to be able to wind up your joint ownership without all the hassle, stress, delay and cost of legal action. Consider also what happens if one of you goes insolvent or is liquidated, or if a co-owner’s creditors attach his/her share for sale in execution. Specify what happens to a co-owner’s share on death. Agree on how you will value the property, or each co-owner’s share in it, if you need to.

The above is of course just a summary of some common issues, so ask your lawyer to help you with your own checklist.

“The Internet is a Real Place with Real Consequences” (Rebecca MacKinnon, Internet policy expert)

We live in an age of online commerce. We buy and sell pretty much anything you can think of on the Internet, whilst contracting online for everything from an Uber ride to a plumber’s call out has become second nature.

So we should all know just how important it is to take note of those annoying little tick boxes saying things like “I agree to the terms and conditions available here” (with of course a hyperlink under the “here” leading you to a list of terms and conditions as long as your arm).

An interesting case recently before the High Court illustrates.

“I’ve won R5m” thought the online gambler

A regular visitor to a bookmaker’s online sports betting website was overjoyed when, after placing over 530 bets over an 8 month period, and for a stake of only R100, he successfully picked the winners in 8 different horse races.

His betting slip showed a “total possible payment” of R4,841,728 and that, thought the gambler, was exactly what he’d won (actually it would have been over R5m before tax).

Imagine his disappointment and distress when the bookmaker paid him only R1m, referring him to its online standard terms and conditions. Clause 9, pointed out the bookmaker, was headed “Maximum Payout” and imposed on every customer a daily winnings limit of R1m.

Unwilling to go down without a fight, the punter sued the bookmaker for the full amount. He hadn’t, he said, read the Ts and Cs (he is no doubt in very good company in that, which is indeed the point of this article) and anyway they were, he argued, overridden by the express reference on his betting slip to the full amount.

Let the signer beware

Unfortunately for him his luck had well and truly run out. The Court dismissed his claim with costs, holding that the “total possible payout” figure quoted on the betting slip could not entitle him to a payout in conflict with the daily limit.

Central to the Court’s decision was its finding that the gambler, when he opened his account on the site, must have ticked a box agreeing to the bookmaker’s standard terms and conditions. “When signing the document by placing an electronic tick in the box”, held the Court, “the applicant placed himself in the same position as a person who had physically signed the document. He is bound by the maxim caveat subscriptor [‘let the signer beware’], whether or not he actually took the trouble to read the terms”.

There’s a strong warning there to all of us – when the chips are down (so to speak) ticking those “I agree to the terms and conditions” boxes online binds you to them. You can’t try to evade them later on by saying “I didn’t actually read and understand them before agreeing – no one ever does”. You’re probably thinking “life’s too short to read all that gumpf”. But then pick your times to be cavalier about it, and when there’s a lot at stake rather take the time to read and understand what you’re agreeing to. Get legal advice in any doubt.

But wait, there’s more (a caution for online product and service providers)

This is an area of law still being explored by our courts, and particularly in these days of strong consumer protections, online service and product providers should note that the bookmaker’s case was bolstered by additional facts, two of them in particular –

1. The punter had been exposed to specific warnings about the limits imposed on winnings both before every bet (i.e. more than 530 times) and thereafter on every betting slip,
2. He always had easy access to the full Ts and Cs via a clickable icon.

Hence the Court’s conclusion that the bookmaker “takes all reasonable steps to ensure that the client assents to the terms and conditions before the account is opened and both prior and subsequent to the placing of any bet the punter is told about the limits on winnings.”

Perhaps the bookmaker would have won his case anyway on nothing more than the tick box and the “signer beware” principle, but on a better-safe-than-sorry basis online providers should perhaps follow the bookmaker’s lead on that one and not rely entirely on a one-off tick in a tick box.

In terms of the new FICA laws, every estate agency is obliged to have a Risk Management and Compliance Programme as part of their business documentation. This is a document which sets out your internal rules and processes for the implementation of your Customer Due Diligence and reporting procedures.

We have taken it upon ourselves to prepare such a document for you to assist you in complying with this new law, as we feel your time would be better spent selling property! Our document is also considerably shorter than other versions currently circulating.

Here is a link to the document. You are welcome to download it and adapt it to your own needs. Just beware if you delete anything. Each part of the document has been drafted to meet a specific requirement of the Act, and if anything is removed, you may be non-compliant!