Why an average of 10 families sue over property every year

Many cases involve legal owners, wrong assumption that they are absolute owners of the real estate

- Tan Ooi Boon

If you have the impression that more families seem to be fighting over real estate in court, you are, sadly, not wrong.

There have been at least 130 such cases here in the past decade alone, meaning that an average of 10 families a year choose to slug it out in court because they could not agree on who the rightful owners of the bricks and mortar are.

And these cases do not include divorces, which invariably involve division - sometimes acrimonious - of assets such as matrimonial homes.

Many people are usually driven to fight in these situations because they get the wrong idea that the legal owners must be the absolute owners, but this is not necessarily true if they have not paid for the properties.

This prompted Professor Tang Hang Wu to write a recent research paper on this controversial topic to throw some light on why such cases happen and how families can better know their rights.

He noted that the common features in these cases involve "long-simmering familial tensions" either between spouses or siblings that usually go public after "a catastrophic event, usually the demise of the family's patriarch or matriarch".

These conflicts are not peculiar to Singapore alone; similar court battles have been erupting in Hong Kong, Malaysia and among Chinese immigrants in New Zealand.

Prof Tang, who is with the Yong Pung How School of Law, said such disputes happened because traditional Asian families were organised along a core societal unit.

"Family members do not think of themselves individually but have a collective identity as a family. In other words, the fortunes of the family members are tied to their families," he noted.