Buying out the other half of the flat (from your ex, from your sibling): what dissolving shared ownership really costs
Two siblings inherit a flat and one of them wants to keep it. Or an unmarried couple bought a home together, they break up, and one of them keeps the house. In both cases the same question comes up, with the same fear behind it: if I pay out the other person’s share, is that like buying a flat from a stranger, with everything that costs?
The short answer is no, and the difference isn’t a nuance: Spanish civil law doesn’t treat it as a sale, but as the mechanism for splitting something that can’t be split. That changes which tax you pay, on what amount, and in one of the three cases, whether you pay anything at all. This is what dissolving shared ownership (extinción de condominio) really costs, with numbers, and the two places where people overpay simply because they didn’t know better.