Shared Vacation Home Agreement Template

If you are considering owning a vacation home with family or friends, or you already do, you should absolutely have a signed agreement from the members involved.

Why? Well, everything is great until it isn’t. Someone books the lake house over the Fourth of July without telling anyone. The deck needs re-staining, but nobody wants to pay for it. Your brother-in-law wants to sell his share, but you have no idea how to handle that.

Conflicts often stem from unclear agreements on scheduling, maintenance costs, or decision-making authority, which can strain relationships.

For these and other reasons, legal experts recommend formal co-ownership contracts, usage schedules, and dispute-resolution clauses to mitigate risks in shared properties. If you are considering or managing a shared vacation home, consulting an attorney specializing in real estate or estate planning will help establish clear terms upfront. But you can also go a long way toward dispute resolution by getting a shared vacation home agreement in place.

Shared Vacation Home Template (free)

Over at OurSharedPlace, the all-in-one digital hub for managing your vacation home, you’ll find a comprehensive co-ownership agreement template that covers the most common areas where shared property owners tend to run into trouble.

It’s free, no signup required, and you can download it right from the blog.

Disclaimer: Consult an attorney before entering into legal agreements. You assume all liability for use of this template.

The template covers eight key areas:

• Ownership structure and percentages. Who owns what, and how was that determined.
• Usage rights and scheduling. How time at the property gets divided up, especially during peak seasons.
• Financial responsibilities. Who pays for what, when, and how. Mortgage, taxes, insurance, utilities, cleaning, the works.
• Maintenance and improvements. Who handles upkeep, how repairs get approved, and what happens in an emergency.
• House rules. Pets, smoking, noise, guests, parking. The small stuff that becomes big stuff when it’s not written down.
• Decision-making and dispute resolution. How votes work, what requires unanimous agreement, and what to do when people disagree.
• Insurance and liability. What coverage you need and who’s responsible for it.
• Exit strategy. Right of first refusal, how to value a share, what happens if someone passes away. This is the section people skip and later regret.

Why bother with a Vacation Home Agreement?

I’ve talked to a lot of families who co-own property together. The ones who do it well have two things in common: they communicate regularly, and they have something written down that everyone agreed to.

The agreement doesn’t have to be adversarial. Think of it more like a prenup for your property. You hope you never need it in a heated moment, but when a question comes up (“Wait, who was supposed to schedule the furnace inspection?”), you just look at the document and move on.

A starting point, not a final product

The template is meant to be customized. Every co-ownership situation is different. Fill it in with your specifics, talk it through with your co-owners, and then have a real estate attorney in your property’s state give it a look before everyone signs. That last step matters.

If you’re already using OurSharedPlace to manage your property, the agreement template is available in your Documents section and you can store the signed version there too.

If you’re not using it yet, the template stands on its own. Grab it and put it to work.