Systems and methods are directed to methods and apparatus for transferring ownership of common resources from a source entity, which owns a resource, to a destination entity, which will own the resource, in a distributed system. The method includes the source entity receiving a command to change ownership (the MOVE command), and then marking the source entity as no longer owning the common resource. The source entity then sends a MOVE command to the destination entity, which will then update its common resource ownership table to reflect that the ownership of the common resource has been transferred from the source entity to the destination entity. It is advantageous that the updating of ownership of the common resource in the source entity occur simultaneously with the dispatching of the MOVE command to the destination entity.