Sometimes the answer isn’t to sell. It’s probably a bad time to sell. I don’t suggest you do it. And yet perhaps you need the money.. OK, so you don’t need it, but it is becomming harder to justify to your wife / husband that it is a necessity. Instead of sell up, why not fractionalise?

Almost anything can be fractionalised, or shared – employees, yachts, cars, boats, real property (consider you holiday house in the Maldives), jewelery, animals (dogs and horses for example). The benefits? You retain ownership of your little beauty, you ensure it is kept in good hands, the resource is made good use of and most importantly, you can quieten your partner because you’ll get some money back for offering it up for sharing.

The most important aspect of sharing, or fractionalising, is to ensure the terms on which you act are clear cut. that is, both the legal terms of who owns what, and also the practical terms, such as what happens to your race car when it isn’t in use, who fills it up with petrol, who replaces the windscreen when a stone hits it on your Sunday morning exhiliration drive? The best way to deal with these matters? have everything agreed in a written agreement.

Of course we provide all the fractional ownership documents you require. That goes without saying. If you need more info on fractional ownership, talk to the specialists at Yours2Share.com – our partners in fractional ownership.

Perhaps you have a swimming pool that you can rent to your neighbour to use every Tuesday, or perhaps you have a race car that you’d allow to be raced by a third party. These are simple sharing agreements – in fact, at law, you are leasing, or licensing the asset (swimming pool, car, boat, horse, land or whatever else) to the third party. This is generaly called ‘timeshare’. The third party doesn’t have any right of ownership to the asset – whatever that be.

A second sharing method is ‘fractional ownership’, where more than one party owns the asset. You could fractionalise almost anything, from a dog to an employee or an aircraft or piece of antique jewelry. Fractional ownership means that at law, both (or all if there are more than two) parties own the asset and have a legal right. Of course the parties themselves must decide the hows, whens and wheres. Take the example of a dog. It is no good simply agreeing that you’ll own half of it and Betty down the road will own the other half. A dog has to be fed, watered, cared for, walked and so on. So in addition to any legal agreement as to percentages or proportions of ownership, you must also decide who shall walk the dog, who is responsible for feeding it and paying the vets bills. The same applies to any asset – an aircraft for example. Whilst it does not need feeding exactly, it must be decided who refills it at the end of a flight.

So if you fractioanlise with a friend or family member, you may trust them not to bother with a written agreement. However, the larger the asset (if you share land or a holiday house in Spain) the more sensible it is to record the deal. (Of course if it is real property, the owners must be on the conveyance deeds anyway). A well written legal agreement will ensure that all, or both, owners know their part in the deal. Not only will it record the legal, but it will set the terms for the sharing arrangement, allowing you to sit back and enjoy the ride.

Net Lawman of course, stock many types of sharing agreement – for cars, boats, horses and land. If we don’t have a template version ready to download, we shall be more than delighted to draw a bespoke agreement for you.

Have a question? Drop us an email here.