Keep Vacation Homes from Splintering Your Family Tree

Matt Parker, a Seattle real estate agent and author of "Real Estate Smart," offers tips on how relatives can share a vacation house without putting a strain on the family:

People I've known have had diabolical family fights based on summer cabins. The second most difficult type of real estate transaction to navigate is one where there's multiple siblings trying to decide what to do with a property they've inherited. If four names are on a property, you need four signatures to sell [it].

In most cases, there is a family that clearly likes the cabin more and can handle the responsibility. A lot of times, it would be as simple as the person who's passing the cabin on to just say: "Hey look, brother Johnny clearly likes it more than anyone else. Is it OK if we give it to him and subtract it from his inheritance?" And then you still have a friendly agreement that the rest of you can use it several weekends a year. You need a chain of command and a rotating schedule of who gets [certain] holidays.