A life tenant can only sell what a life tenant has
A life estate lasts for a measuring life. The life tenant may sell, lease or mortgage that interest, but cannot convey a fee simple or devise the estate.
Worked example: Maria holds a life estate with Noah as remainderman and signs a warranty deed to a buyer. The buyer takes only Maria's life interest, which ends at her death, when Noah takes.
The trap: letting the deed form enlarge what the grantor owns. A warranty deed conveys the fee only if the grantor has it. The opposite overcorrection also fails: the buyer does not get nothing, since a life estate is freely conveyable. Property returning to the grantor is a reversion; property going to a named third party is a remainder.
Condominium versus cooperative
A condominium owner holds a fee interest in the unit plus an undivided interest in the common elements — real property, conveyed by deed. In a cooperative the corporation owns the building; the resident owns shares plus a proprietary lease, and no real estate. Stock is personalty even if the corporation owns land.
The trap: the distractor reversing the two, giving the condominium owner stock and the cooperative owner a deed. The co-op resident owns no ground.
Condominium assessment math
Worked example: 40 equal units, annual budget $240,000. Each unit holds 1 ÷ 40 = 2.5% of the common elements, so its share is $240,000 × 2.5% = $6,000 per year, or $6,000 ÷ 12 = $500 per month.
Reporting $6,000 as monthly states the annual number in the wrong period. Dividing by 25 units instead of 40 gives 4.0% and $800 per month.
Time-share estates and uses
A time-share estate is an ownership or leasehold interest in real property divided into measurable chronological periods. A time-share use is any contractual right of exclusive occupancy that is not an estate, and an interval is either one. So an ownership product is an estate, a contractual product a use, both intervals. Both are regulated; a week is not too short to create an interest.