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Within days of beginning your search for a home, you’ll start encountering all manner of tricky and pedantic real estate terms. Two of the most confusing are “twin home” and “duplex.” They sound like they are interchangeable terms for the same kind of residence. but they aren’t.
Superficially, these two property types often look almost identical, so you’d be forgiven for assuming these are just regional variations, similar to the way one person’s soda is another’s person pop. But the key to telling the difference between them lies in understanding the difference between a house and the lot it’s built on.
Do the homes share walls?
A lot is literally the land upon which your house is built. It can be much larger than the actual structure, or it can be more or less exactly the size of your house, as is the case with many townhomes.
When it comes to differentiating between duplexes and twin homes, the key difference is in who owns the lot.
Duplex: In a duplex (or a triplex, or a quadplex) there are multiple properties on a single lot. Usually the properties are part of the same structure. Because there is just one lot, it’s very common that one occupant will own the lot and the structure(s) and rent one or more of the properties. If the properties (the houses) are owned separately (with one or more of the homeowners in a “leased-land” situation) or if the lot is owned communally, the homeowners will have to coordinate and cooperate in matters like landscaping or repairs. Twin home: A twin home, in contrast, is two properties that share a wall built across two separate lots. Unlike a duplex, folks owning one-half each of a twin home are free to do as they wish with their side of the property, because the properties are considered separate despite sharing a wall.(For clarity’s sake, a townhome is a single property on a single lot, despite the fact that it may share walls with the homes on either side.)
How to tell the difference between a twin home and a duplex
It can be difficult to tell at a glance whether a property is a twin home or a duplex, but one clue will be the “twin”-ness of the homes. While a duplex may be constructed in a similar fashion to a twin home (with mirror-image houses sharing a center wall), a duplex is any structure where multiple homes share a single lot, so the layout can be more varied. Many duplexes are stacked vertically, for example, or built as split-level homes.
Twin homes, in contrast, are always twins unless previous owners have made big renovations. So if the houses look like mirror images of each other with a shared center wall, there’s a good chance it’s a twin home situation, but you can’t know this with absolute certainty without checking the property records—and it makes a real difference in terms of your responsibility towards the lot and your level of independence. Living in a duplex might come with a lot of restrictions concerning how you can alter the property, and both types of homes come with certain privacy issues because of their proximity and shared walls.
