The Difference Between a ‘Duplex’ and a ‘Twin Home’
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...
Koichiko
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 l
ies in understanding
the difference between a house and the lot it’s built on.
Do the homes share walls?
A lot i
s literally the land up
on 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.
(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.
