Two Names on Title, No Agreement, and a Falling-Out

The situation

Bohdan owned a construction company and had worked alongside Andriy, who ran a multi-unit franchise business, on and off for years. In 2022, the two decided to buy an investment property together in London — a solid, income-producing building they both believed was undervalued. They split the down payment evenly, went on title as joint tenants, and moved forward on a handshake understanding: they would each contribute to expenses, split the rental income, and figure out an exit "if it ever came to that."

It came to that roughly eighteen months later. Andriy's franchise business hit a rough stretch and he wanted to sell the property to free up cash. Bohdan, whose construction company was doing well, wanted to keep it and continue collecting rental income. Neither had signed anything setting out how a disagreement like this should be resolved, what would happen if one wanted out and the other did not, or how the property would be valued if a buyout became necessary.

By the time Bohdan came to Treadstone Law, the two men were no longer speaking directly, communicating only through terse text messages, and the property's finances had become a flashpoint — Andriy claimed he was owed money for expenses he had covered; Bohdan disputed the figures.

The legal problem

When two or more people hold title to a property together without a co-ownership agreement, Ontario law gives very little structure to fall back on. As joint tenants, Bohdan and Andriy each had an equal, undivided interest in the whole property — but nothing on paper said how decisions would be made, how net rental income would be calculated after expenses, or what would happen if one co-owner wanted to sell and the other did not.

Without an agreement, the default legal remedy for a co-owner who wants out and cannot get the other to agree is an application to the court for partition and sale — a process that asks the court to order the property sold and the proceeds divided, or in rarer cases to physically divide the property. Partition and sale applications are not fast. They typically take many months to work through the court system, and by the time a judge orders a sale, the relationship between the co-owners is usually damaged beyond repair and both sides have paid legal costs that could have gone toward the deal itself.

There was a second layer of difficulty: the two men disagreed on the numbers. Andriy said he had advanced roughly $18,000 more than Bohdan toward property taxes, insurance, and a roof repair over the eighteen months they had owned it together, and wanted that reconciled before any buyout. Bohdan said the figure was inflated and that some of what Andriy called "expenses" were really improvements Andriy had made unilaterally, without consulting him, and shouldn't be treated the same way. With no agreement specifying how joint expenses would be tracked, approved, or reimbursed, both positions were arguable — which is exactly the kind of dispute a co-ownership agreement is written to prevent.

The property itself had also changed in value. An independent appraisal Bohdan commissioned put its current worth at about $1,650,000, up from the roughly $1,400,000 they had paid. That gain needed to be reflected fairly in whatever buyout figure the two men settled on — another point with no pre-agreed method for calculating it.

What we did

1. Confirmed the ownership structure and the absence of any governing agreement. A review of the title and closing documents confirmed Bohdan and Andriy held the property as joint tenants with nothing beyond the standard purchase documents — no side agreement, no declaration of trust, no shareholders' or partnership-style agreement of any kind governing how they would deal with each other as co-owners.
2. Advised on the realistic alternative to negotiation. Before any negotiation began, Bohdan needed to understand what would happen if talks failed: an application to the court for partition and sale, months of delay, legal costs on both sides, and a forced sale that neither of them controlled the timing or terms of. Understanding that this was the fallback — not a threat, but the genuine default outcome under Ontario law — reframed the negotiation. A negotiated buyout, even an imperfect one, was very likely to leave both men better off than litigation.
3. Retained an independent appraisal and proposed it as the valuation anchor. Rather than let the two men argue past each other about what the property was worth, we recommended a single independent appraisal both sides could rely on. Andriy's lawyer agreed to accept the same appraisal rather than commissioning a competing one, which removed one entire axis of dispute.
4. Proposed a structured reconciliation of the disputed expenses. We asked both sides to produce receipts and bank records for the eighteen months in question, then worked with Andriy's lawyer to sort the disputed $18,000 into categories: routine carrying costs (which both owners were responsible for regardless of who had paid them), and discretionary improvements made without the other owner's agreement (which were treated differently, with only partial credit allowed, since Bohdan had never consented to them).
5. Negotiated a buyout structure with a holdback. Bohdan wanted to keep the property, so the practical solution was a buyout: Bohdan would pay Andriy for his half-interest, refinancing the property to raise the funds. To protect against any further disputed figures surfacing after closing, a modest holdback was built into the closing funds, to be released to Andriy once both sides confirmed the final accounting was accurate.
6. Drafted a proper release and closing documentation. The final agreement included a mutual release so that once the buyout closed, neither man could reopen the expense dispute or make further claims against the other related to their period of co-ownership — bringing real finality to a relationship that had already frayed past the point of doing further business together.

The outcome

The buyout closed roughly four months after Bohdan first came to Treadstone Law — far faster than a partition and sale application would have taken, but far from instant. Andriy received a payment reflecting half the current appraised value of about $1,650,000, topped up by the portion of the disputed $18,000 that was reconciled in his favour as routine carrying costs, for a net amount of roughly $831,000. Bohdan refinanced the property to fund it, taking on a larger mortgage than he had originally planned, and kept sole ownership going forward.

Both men got a resolution, but it came at a real cost. Bohdan paid legal fees on both his own side and, indirectly, absorbed some of the friction from a rushed refinance under time pressure once negotiations concluded. Andriy accepted less certainty than a clean, pre-agreed exit formula would have given him, and spent months in a dispute that a single document could have prevented. The relationship between the two men, once a genuine business partnership, did not survive the process — they have not done business together since.

This was not a case where anything went wrong with the property itself, the mortgage, or the paperwork at closing. The entire cost — in money, time, and a damaged relationship — came from a single missing document that would have taken a fraction of the time and expense to put in place at the outset.

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