In principle, the sale of a co-ownership share in a property can also trigger taxation if it occurs within ten years of acquisition. Exceptions apply in particular where the property is owner-occupied and was used for the owner's own residential purposes in the year of sale and the two preceding years. In a case decided by the BFH in 2023, a married couple had acquired a single-family home in 2008 and lived in it together from that point on.
After the marriage later ran into difficulties, the husband moved out in 2015 and in 2017 sold his half co-ownership share to his wife. She continued to live in the property with their child. The tax office treated this as a taxable disposal of the property share, since the ten-year period had not yet expired and the husband had moved out more than two years before the sale. As a result, he had no longer been using the property himself during that period.
The husband argued that, in the period between moving out and the sale, he had effectively allowed his child to use his half of the home. In principle, allowing a child to use a property does count as owner-occupation under the rules on property disposals, but the BFH did not consider this decisive in this case for denying taxation. The BFH also did not accept as a relevant argument any pressure to sell that may have been exerted by the wife.
Note
The case shows how quickly tax-related harm can arise in the difficult context of a separation. Here, this could have been avoided, for example by waiting for the ten-year period to expire before the sale.