In our daily pursuit of real estate investing excellence, let’s take a short detour through the concept of Tenant In Common (TIC). As you might guess, a TIC scenario is when more than one investor owns a single property. There are so many problems that can arise in this sort of partnership but all of them can be nicely summed up with a quote from Jason’s grandmother: “The hardest ship to sail is a partnership.”
Think the human race is a bullheaded, confusing lot? Try sticking a handful or more of them together as co-owners of a piece of income property and see what happens. It ain’t a pretty sight.
Here’s a quick example. Say one of the owners decides to repair or improve the property. He might expect that the rest of the owners will pitch in with the cost. Wrong! They can if they want to but are under no obligation to do so. Ouch. There’s a prescription for hard feelings.
By now, if you’re a Creating Wealth blog regular, you have probably already predicted what we’re going to say next. TIC’s directly contradict Jason’s third commandment about maintaining direct control. Do you think he was able to amass the wealth and real estate portfolio he has by ignoring his own commandments?
The answer to that is no. The lesson here is keep control of your investments. Don’t turn them over to a third party.
