Joint Tenant

A concurrent estate or co-tenancy is a concept in property law, particularly derived from the common law of real property, which describes the various ways in which property can be owned by more than one person at a given time. The parties who own property jointly are referred to as co-tenants or joint tenants. Most common-law jurisdictions recognize three kinds of concurrent estate: tenancy in common, joint tenancy with right of survivorship, and tenancy by the entirety. Many jurisdictions simply refer to a joint tenancy with right of survivorship as a joint tenancy, but a few U.S. States treat the phrase joint tenancy as synonymous with a tenancy in common.

The type of ownership determines the rights of the parties to convey their interest in the property to others, to will the property to their devisees, or to sever their joint ownership of the property. Just as each of these affords a different set of rights and responsibilities to the joint owners of property, each requires a different set of conditions in order to exist.

Rights and duties shared by all co-tenants

Co-tenants, irrespective of the type of tenancy, share certain rights to the property:

1. Each tenant has an unrestricted right of access to the property. Where one co-tenant wrongfully excludes another from making use of the property, the excluded co-tenant can bring a cause of action for ouster, and may receive the fair rental value of the property for the time that he was dispossessed.
2. Each tenant has a right to an accounting of profits made from the property. If the property generates income such as rent, each tenant is entitled to a proportion of that income.
3. Each tenant has a right of contribution for the costs of owning the property. Co-tenants can be forced to contribute to the payment of expenses such as repairs, property taxes, and mortgages on the entire property.

Co-tenants do not have any obligation to contribute to any costs of improving the property. If one co-tenant adds a feature that enhances the value of the property, that co-tenant has no right to demand that any others share the cost of adding that feature - even if other co-tenants reap greater profits from the property because of it. However, at partition, a co-tenant is entitled to recover the value added by his or her improvements of the property. Conversely, if the co-tenant's "improvements" decrease the value of the property, the co-tenant is responsible for those decreases as well.

Furthermore, each co-tenant can independently encumber their own share in the property by taking out a mortgage on that share; other co-tenants have no obligation to help pay a mortgage that only runs to another tenant's share of the property, and the mortgagee can only foreclose on that share.

Finally, co-tenants owe one another a duty of fair dealing. Because of this, any co-tenant who acquires a mortgage claim against the property must give his co-tenants a reasonable opportunity to purchase proportionate shares in that claim.

Joint Tenancy is a kind of Co-ownership in land law. The joint tenants co-own a property. If one of them dies, the number of co-owners reduces and the other surviving joint tenants suceed to his interest in the property. Under joint tenancy, each joint tenant is regarded as owning nothing by himself, but as holding the whole estate along with his fellow co-owners.

There are distinctions between joint tenancy and tenancy in common. For tenants in common, each of the co-owners is regarded as holding a share of the property.