If you’re a homeowner, one of the things you may have found strange when buying your home, was that at some point you had to decide – when talking about a couple – whether or not to hold the property as” Joint Tenants” or “Tenants in Common”.

It seems really strange that the word “tenant” should be used at all, especially when you're becoming a homeowner. But that just seems to be the way that things are, right? More on that another time, but for now.....

We know a lot of people get confused between a Joint Tenancy and a Tenancy in Common.


Here’s Nick short explanation …

Joint Tenant or Tenants in Common, are terms you tend to find when you’re buying a property. It’s not necessarily anything to do with the mortgage, so your mortgage broker, or mortgage company, generally won’t have a conversation about it.

But your solicitor is likely to ask: “how do you want to own the property”? Do you want to be Joint Owners, or do you want to be Tenants in Common?

The thing is, many people will say – particularly if they're part of a couple… “Oh we want to be Joint Owners” without actually understanding what it means.

Joint Tenants…

Let’s imagine the case of a husband and wife. They have a Joint Ownership (actually the legal term is Beneficial Joint Tenancy) which means that they each own: all of the property.

This means: when the first person passes-on, the survivor owns the whole property.

That works automatically. Ownership passes to the survivor on death.

So the question has to be, “is that good, or is that bad?”

It really depends on the situation.

A Joint Tenancy means that there’s no need for probate, there is no need to do anything really. There may be a need for tax planning, but there’s no need to get probate in order to transfer the property to the survivor.  

And in most cases if the couple were married, as in this example, there is no inheritance tax.

A good way looking at it is to imagine that we’re talking about a joint bank account,  You’ve got two signatories on the bank account, for example; “Mr and Mrs”, and one of the joint-signatories dies. The surviving signatory owns the “value”.