In Crossroads, the shares of the hotel were split between more than one person and in true business terms the person with the "biggest slice of the cake" as it were is technically in charge.

When the show returned in March 2001 the distribution of shares in Crossroads were as follows:

Later, from March 20th, Patrick agreed to give Jake a share in the hotel after he applied pressure to get it, although he had other ideas which included trying to convince Jill to turn her shares to him.

From here on in, Jake persuaded Jill, and later Sarah-Jane, relentlessly to sell her shares to him which, as you can see above, would give him 55% and hence control of the hotel. Somewhat unsurprisingly, she did not sell to him.

By now one Mr Adam Chance had caught the taste for a share in Crossroads and proposed to marry Jill in the hope that she would give him her share. She did marry him and when his real motive emerged for the marriage, Jill vowed to sign the shares over to her daughter.

In an attempt to convince her otherwise, Adam followed her out of the hotel to the lake where he murdered her by holding her head under the water, thus drowning her. Jill's shares, by now, had been signed to her daughter:

Things stayed pretty much the same for the next four months after that. By then, Mark had proposed to Sarah-Jane for her hand in marriage, but Patrick, after his first heart attack, hired a private invesigator to "dig the dirt" on Sarah-Jane and one of the things uncovered was that Sarah-Jane was not Sarah-Jane. She was Louise Dixon, an imposter. However the real Sarah-Jane was eventually discovered, and although she now owned 30% of the hotel as inherited from Jill, this was tied up in her estate for much of the next year (Sarah was later able to get 15% out and have a say in the hotel).

Come Christmas time, Patrick had a second heart attack which was fatal. He left behind his wife Kate, children Mark and Nicola, stepson Jake, daughter-in-law Tracey and grandson Scott. At the reading of his will in 2002, the share arrangements changed as follows:

At the end of July 2002, the hotel was finally sold to a property developer, who just so happened to be Victor Barnes. He expressed plans to redevelope the area and convert Crossroads into a new luxury and housing suite.

Victor, however, later died from a heart attack. Despite having three daughters of his own, he left the hotel to his brother Max Samson and the hotel came under Samson Enterprises with a condition that Kate had to have a job at the new hotel. It was refurbished, redecorated and relaunched.

Nothing more was said about shares in the hotel apart from comments that Kate no longer owned the place so from this we can deduce that the Samsons now had the lion's share of the shares in the hotel. Indeed they did - When the hotel was sold to Vic Barnes, it was a joint decision between all of the shareholders to sell, or a majority decision. Therefore, 100% of the hotel went to Vic Barnes and onto Max Samson when he inherited the lot.

(With thanks to Chris Naylor for corrections and paying more attention to Mark II than I did :))