Empirical studies in the bargaining literature have shown that assets in the hands of women have welfare implications for women and their households. Land and housing are among the more important assets in rural sub-Saharan Africa. Ownership rights over these assets enable women to use their land in multiple ways, derive the proceeds from the crops they grow, secure a place to live, and are especially important for long-term empowerment. From a policy perspective it is important to understand the pathways by which resource ownership influences individual and household outcomes. One such pathway is from asset ownership to household income diversification, which is an important survival strategy for poor households in rural Africa and is shown to have a positive effect on household welfare. Using the IFPRI household data set from Malawi, ‘Financial Markets and Household Food Security, 1995’, this paper explores if individual ownership of property determines household diversification patterns. Number of income sources and the inverse of the Herfindahl index of concentration are the two measures of income diversification used in this paper. Ordinary Least Squares models, disaggregated by headship status, are estimated to examine the effect of individual property ownership on household income diversification. The preliminary analysis suggests that individual property ownership does indeed impact diversification, though in some rather unexpected ways. In male-headed households, women’s property ownership contributes to specialization while men’s property ownership contributes to greater diversification. In female-headed households, their property ownership does not affect diversification.