GR 196403; (December, 2016) (Digest)
G.R. No. 196403 . December 07, 2016.
ARSENIO TABASONDRA, ET AL., PETITIONERS, VS. SPOUSES CONRADO CONSTANTINO AND TARCILA TABASONDRA-CONSTANTINO, ET AL., RESPONDENTS.
FACTS
The parties are the children of the late Cornelio Tabasondra from two marriages. The dispute involves three parcels of land originally co-owned by Cornelio and his two sisters, Valentina and Valeriana, all of whom died intestate without partitioning the property. The petitioners, children from Cornelio’s second marriage, filed an action for partition and accounting against the respondents, children from the first marriage. The respondents opposed a partition of the entire property, claiming they had acquired the shares of the deceased sisters, Valentina and Valeriana, through a Deed of Absolute Sale executed in 1982, thereby owning two-thirds of the property.
The Regional Trial Court (RTC) ordered the partition of the entire property among all the heirs of Cornelio, Valentina, and Valeriana, effectively disregarding the deed of sale. On appeal, the Court of Appeals (CA) modified the RTC decision. The CA recognized the validity of the sale and limited the partition to only the remaining one-third share of the property, which represented the portion inherited from Cornelio and still held in common by all his heirs.
ISSUE
Whether the Court of Appeals erred in upholding the validity of the Deed of Absolute Sale and consequently limiting the partition to only the unsold one-third portion of the property.
RULING
The Supreme Court affirmed the CA decision with modification. The Court upheld the validity of the sale executed by co-owners Valentina and Valeriana in favor of respondents Sebastian and Tarcila. The legal logic is grounded in Article 493 of the Civil Code, which explicitly provides that each co-owner has the full right to alienate, assign, or mortgage their own undivided share in the co-owned property. This right exists independently of the consent of the other co-owners. The effect of such an alienation is not to make the buyer a co-owner in the original property, but rather to substitute the buyer in the place of the selling co-owner with respect to that specific share.
Consequently, upon the death of the selling co-owners, their rights and obligations under the sale passed to their heirs. The respondents, as buyers, validly acquired the undivided two-thirds shares of Valentina and Valeriana. Therefore, the property to be partitioned was correctly limited to the remaining one-third share, which was the portion originally belonging to Cornelio and inherited in common by all his children from both marriages. The Court remanded the case to the RTC to effect the partition of this one-third share and to conduct an accounting of its fruits, in accordance with the rules on co-ownership and partition.