You and your spouse have been together for around 10 years. During that time, you focused on buying homes and turning them into rental properties. Today, you have seven homes in your real estate portfolio. You earn a few thousand dollars each month from the renters who live there.
When your spouse decided that she wanted to get a divorce, one of the first things you thought about was how difficult it would be to divide your real estate. Every property has great, long-standing tenants. You’ve been very fortunate and would hate to ask anyone to leave.
How should you handle rented real estate during a divorce?
During your divorce, one thing you can talk to your spouse about is if she is interested in the properties or if she’d like to be bought out. If you have the ability to get loans or to come up with the value that she’d be owed, then it may make sense to offer to buy her out of the properties and to move them into your name if she agrees to that.
If she’s interested in maintaining the properties, another option would be to move a few of the homes into her name and to transfer a few of the others into your own. You’ll want to make sure you have your own mortgage in your own name so that your spouse won’t have a claim to the property in the future (and vice versa).
Having to divide real estate can be hard. Our website has more on getting your properties valued and deciding on how you want to divide them.
