California Partition Law Blog

By Eli Underwood Property owners who skip estate planning are walking into a financial trap. Tangled titles pile up. Fractional ownership disputes multiply. Forced partition auctions drain equity. Family assets fragment across generations, and there's no easy way back. Without clear documentation—without wills, without trusts, without written agreement on ownership—properties get locked down. Owners...

Why Co-Ownership Disputes Are Rising in Southern California Three of the ten fastest-growing zip codes in the United States are in Southern California, according to a RentCafe analysis covering 2014 to 2023. That kind of growth doesn't just mean more homes and more neighbors. It means more people buying property together, often quickly, and...

The monthly cost of owning a median-priced U.S. home, mortgage, insurance, and property taxes combined, now runs about $3,200 in today's dollars, according to Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies. That's 46 percent higher than 2019 in real terms, and it exceeds what homeowners paid in 1990, when 30-year mortgage rates were above 10...

Yes, in most cases, you can force a trustee to produce trust documents in California, either by petitioning the probate court under Probate Code section 17200 or, if a partition case is already pending, through ordinary civil discovery. Trust documents can be the missing piece in a California partition dispute. If a home passed...

By Eli Underwood Owning a home is still a big part of the American dream. Getting there, however, looks very different from what it did for previous generations. People still buy homes today (sales increased by 3.2% in May 2026, according to the National Association of Realtors), but they face higher hurdles, such as...

Can You Dissolve a Trust? (Probate Code section 15403) People often think that once a trust is created, it is locked in forever. That is not always true. In California, a trust can sometimes be dissolved, but the answer depends on the type of trust, the language of the trust document, and who is...

Who is the Agent for Service of Process for a Partnership? (Corporations Code section 16309) Before a case can move forward, the plaintiff must properly notify the defendant that a lawsuit has been filed. This is known as service of process. When the defendant is a partnership, however, many people wonder: Who is authorized...

California Has 105 Cities Where Even the Cheapest Homes Cost $1 Million. If You Co-Own One of Them, That Equity Isn't Yours Until You Can Actually Sell. Editor's note: This post draws on a June 2026 Zillow analysis reported by Axios showing that 242 U.S. cities now have million-dollar starter homes — California accounts...

Does a Partition Action Address Contributions? Owning property with someone else can become complicated very quickly. At first, co-owners may agree to split expenses, maintain the property together, and share responsibility equally. But when relationships break down, one owner often ends up carrying more of the burden. Sometimes one co-owner pays the mortgage, handles...

By Eli Underwood For unmarried partners and cohabiting couples navigating a highly inflated housing market, pooling financial resources is increasingly the only viable path onto the property ladder. Data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR) indicates their stake among first-time buyers has jumped from 4% in 1985 to 11% in 2025. However, while...