🏡 Affordability Is the Buzzword of the Season — Here’s a Real Solution

Turn on the news, scroll your feed, or just talk to anyone shopping for a home in LA right now, and you’ll hear the same word over and over: affordability. It’s a political talking point, sure, but it’s also just Tuesday for a lot of my clients. So let’s set the politics aside for a second and talk about something practical — a path to ownership that’s been quietly working in this city for decades, and one I think more buyers should understand: the Tenancy in Common, or TIC.

Here’s a belief I hold pretty firmly, and I say it to almost every buyer I sit down with: anyone can be a homeowner. Not everyone can buy the first house they fall in love with, and not everyone can do it this year — but with the right planning and the right strategy, ownership is more reachable than the headlines make it sound. TICs are one of those strategies, and I don’t think they get nearly enough airtime.

What a TIC Actually Is

A Tenancy in Common isn’t a separate deeded unit the way a condo is. Instead, you and your co-owners each hold an undivided percentage interest in the whole property, with a private agreement that assigns you exclusive use of a specific unit. It sounds a little abstract until you realize the structural piece that actually made this work at scale: fractional financing. Each owner gets their own individual loan and their own deed of trust against their own percentage interest, rather than everyone being tied to one shared, group loan. That single change is what turned TICs from a legal curiosity into a real financing tool.

A Little History

TICs as a modern ownership structure trace back to San Francisco in the 1980s, largely credited to real estate attorney Andy Sirkin, who pioneered the individual-loan structure that made co-ownership actually financeable. They took off there for a very specific reason: San Francisco’s rent control and tight condo-conversion limits made it genuinely difficult to convert an apartment building into individually deeded condos. TICs became the workaround — a way to offer real ownership in multi-unit buildings without needing a subdivision map.

Los Angeles has the same underlying pressure. Condo conversion here is heavily restricted, but converting a building to a TIC doesn’t require a subdivision map, which is exactly why I’ve been seeing more of them pop up in denser, multi-unit-heavy pockets of the city — Silver Lake, Echo Park, West Adams, that kind of neighborhood.

The Honest Pros and Cons

The upside is real: TICs typically price 10 to 20 percent below comparable condos, which is a meaningful gap when every percentage point of affordability matters. You’re not renting — you own a real, appreciating interest in real property.

Now the honest downside, because I’m not going to sell you on something without telling you where it’s imperfect. TICs still have a smaller buyer pool than condos, since fewer lenders offer this kind of financing, which means you generally want to plan on holding longer to let appreciation do its work and to give yourself more resale flexibility. Here’s my read on that, though: as TICs become more common in LA the way they already are in San Francisco, I expect lending to loosen up and the buyer pool to grow with it — which, over a decade, makes today’s TIC purchase look more like an early move than a compromise.

Lending and Structure

As of 2025–26, TIC loans typically require 15 to 25 percent down, with rates that run modestly above conventional financing. Most are adjustable-rate, because these loans get held in the lender’s own portfolio rather than sold off to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac — which is also why the list of lenders who actually do this kind of lending is short and worth knowing personally, rather than something I’d hand you a name for in a newsletter, since rosters change. I’ll walk you through who’s active when we talk.

One more LA-specific detail worth flagging honestly: the Ellis Act and rent-stabilization rules are part of this conversation, since TIC conversions can intersect with tenant protections, and the LA City Council has directed the city to keep monitoring how these conversions play out. I’d rather tell you that upfront than have you find out later — a fully disclosed structure is always the stronger position to buy from.

The Investor Angle

This isn’t just a buyer’s tool — it’s a genuinely smart move for investors, too. Say you pick up a multifamily building that would sell for a modest number as-is. Fix it up, put a TIC structure in place, and sell the units individually rather than the building as a whole, and you can often net more per unit than you would from a single bulk sale to another investor. That spread — between what a cap-rate buyer would pay for the whole building and what you collect selling units individually — is the whole economic case for doing it. The sell-out process typically runs 18 to 30 months, and you absolutely need a qualified attorney to set the structure up correctly from day one. This isn’t a DIY project.

What You Can Do

If you’re a buyer who’s been priced out of the condo market and want a real, ownership-track alternative, start by having an honest conversation about your hold timeline — TICs reward patience. If you’re an investor sitting on a multifamily property, get a TIC-experienced attorney and an agent in the room early, before you even start renovation planning, since the structure affects how you’ll ultimately market and sell.

If any of this has you curious, I’ve put together a comprehensive TIC packet that walks through the financing, the structure, and what to expect start to finish — just reach out and I’ll send it your way.

And speaking of alternative ownership — next issue, I’m breaking down co-ops and exactly how they differ from TICs. Different structure, different playbook, and worth understanding before you rule either one out.

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Here for you, always! Your Real Estate JED.i 🥷