If you were to try and move to some of the remotest places in the world like one of the Pacific island nations, you’d have a real challenge on your hands trying to buy property. It’s not that there is absolutely no property on sale, but there are very few options. What the people do is pass their properties on to their children, who in turn pass them on down the family line and properties are very rarely sold. We could learn a lot from these people over here in the West with one of these lessons indeed being that of why family properties should never get sold off.

The security that comes with shelter

Life’s unpredictability is such that you could be flying sky-high one day by way of your financial success and then find yourself two dollars away from living in the gutters a very short time later. This is where the security of a family home comes to the fore, making for a safety net any family member can fall back on should things not quite work out for them.

Often it will only be a temporary need to “move back home” in any case, just until you can find your feet again. It can otherwise prove to be extremely difficult to provide for you basic need of shelter if you don’t have a base to work off of.

Usually disputes concerning how the family property should be handled arise between siblings to whom the family home has been left by the parents, so this is perhaps when it’s important to put forth the argument that any one of the siblings can “go back home” and find refuge in the house their parents made into a home should the very possible need arise.

A source of passive income

Understandably so, children who grew up in a certain neighbourhood or town typically want to spread their wings and fly the nest properly, which means they’d see themselves living somewhere else. This would imply that none of the siblings has a desire to assume full time ownership and responsibility for their parents’ house and so nobody could be available to look after it. In this case then renting it out is always an option.

This would provide for a passive income channel of which the rent monies collected can be shared equally amongst the siblings, albeit it probably won’t be all that much depending on how many parties it’s shared between. At the same time ownership remains in the family and the option of a destitute sibling going back home to find their feet remains.

Selling to buy

The only condition under which a family home can be sold is if there is an intention to cash in on the value and immediately buy another property which belongs to the family. The property market is one of the most stable markets by way of value-retention, so you’ll likely be able to buy a property of similar value if you sell at a specific time with the intention of buying again.