A woman identified in the report as Beate Weber — a pseudonym — owns a house and has three sons, and has spent recent weeks troubled by how to hand the property on without shortchanging any of her children. Her situation is set out in a question-and-answer piece published on the finances pages of the FAZ under the heading "Three sons and a house: how do I inherit fairly?"
Weber's own thought experiment is simple: if the house could be divided into three, each son would receive an equally sized portion and her worry about treating one child less favourably as an heir would disappear. The report notes that she is well aware this is hard to realise in practice, since the solid walls of a house do not allow it simply to be carved up into pieces.
Legally, the article says, she could have all three sons entered in the land register. But it adds that a co-ownership share of this kind would be of little practical use to them — there is not much they could buy with it. Weber therefore still has to find another solution to the problem that has been bothering her.
Sources: FAZ.