Court Order to Force Sale of Property: How Long It Takes and What It Costs

You have separated, you are trying to move on, but the house is still there in both your names and every conversation about selling it goes nowhere. Your ex will not agree to list it, will not agree to buy you out, and will not agree to anything much at all.

So here is the short answer. Yes, a court can order a jointly owned property to be sold, even when the other owner refuses. How long it takes and what it costs depends on two things: whether the sale is agreed or contested, and which of two legal routes applies to you. Working out which route you are on is the first thing our property settlement lawyers sort out with you, because it changes the whole process. The sections below show the pattern, and which route is yours.

Cost and duration at a glance

Three routes, three very different price tags:

• Agreed sale, formalised through consent orders. The cheaper, faster path. Little pushes it up once you both agree.
• Contested court-ordered sale (separating couple). Slower and dearer. What pushes it up: disclosure delays, disputed valuations, court listing times, a party who stalls.
• Non-couple co-owner sale (partition or statutory trustee). A different legal route again. What pushes it up: a co-owner who contests the trustee appointment.

The pattern behind the numbers is simple. An agreed sale is faster and cheaper than a contested one, every time. The rest of this page is really about how to get as close to the agreed end of that scale as you can.

When will a court order a sale?

For a separating couple, the power to order a sale sits inside a property settlement. For married couples that is section 79, and for de facto couples it is section 90SM, both governed by the ‘just and equitable’ test in the Family Law Act 1975 (Cth) (legislation.gov.au). In plain terms, the court asks what a fair division of the property pool looks like, and selling a house is often the cleanest way to get there.

Since the reforms that took effect on 10 June 2025, that four-step process is written directly into the Act, and the court must now weigh the economic effect of family violence when it divides property (Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia).

A court can order the sale at the end of a matter, as part of the final settlement. It can also order it earlier, through interim orders, which is often the faster route when one person is stalling.

The most common version of that I see is asking the court to put the property on the market before the whole matter is finished.

One of the most common examples would be applying for a property that you or your ex spouse owns to be listed for sale on the market, because this can often create a source of tension and create delays if one party is deliberately dragging their feet on listing the property for sale.

One myth worth clearing up early. The property question is decided on what is ‘just and equitable’, not on the ‘best interests of the children’ test that governs parenting matters. Children’s living arrangements can still bear on the timing of a sale, or support an order that one parent stay in the home for a period, but they are not the test for whether the property gets sold.

Which route applies to you

There are two separate pathways, and the first thing to work out is which one is yours.

You are a separating couple, married or de facto. Your sale happens inside a family law property settlement under the Family Law Act (section 79 for married couples, section 90SM for de facto couples). This is the route most people on this page are on.

You are co-owners who were never a couple. Business partners, investors, siblings, friends who bought together. Your route is not the Family Law Act at all. It is partition, or an application for a court-appointed statutory trustee to sell the property, under state law. In New South Wales that power comes from section 66G of the Conveyancing Act 1919 (NSW) (NSW legislation). If you are outside New South Wales, other states and territories have their own equivalent of this partition process.

How long it takes, and what drives it

Time comes down to a handful of things: whether the sale is agreed or contested, how quickly both sides disclose their finances, whether the valuation is disputed, how busy the court list is, and whether you are seeking interim orders or waiting for a final hearing.

There is also a clock on the whole thing. For married couples, an application generally has to be brought within 12 months of the divorce order becoming final (section 44(3)). For de facto couples, it is 2 years from the date of separation (section 44(5)) (Family Law Act 1975 (Cth)). The clock starts ticking on those dates, so if a sale is stalling, do not let it run down while you wait for the other side to cooperate.

It helps to understand why the other side stalls in the first place.

If there are businesses involved, people may delay finalising valuations or produce incomplete financial records in order to show a lower valuation of the business. Or, in extreme cases, they’re waiting for the other party to run out of money or patience and hoping that they’re just going to settle for less.

Once you see the stall for what it is, the answer is usually to stop negotiating with yourself and ask the court to move things along.

What it costs, and what drives it

Cost tracks the same logic as time. An agreed sale formalised through consent orders is the cheap end. A contested court order is the expensive end. In between sit the things that add up: a single expert valuer is far cheaper than two sides paying for competing valuations, and a statutory trustee brings trustee and agent fees a private sale would not.

And if one side deliberately drags it out, that runs up the cost for both of you. It can also affect how a court later deals with the question of who pays.

A real outcome

Here is how one of these matters actually ran. A business owner delayed disclosure for over a year, saying he was still collecting his financial records. His former partner came to us after months of getting nowhere. Me and my team filed proceedings, subpoenaed the business accounts directly from the accountant, and had a single expert valuer appointed. Within six months the matter was resolved at a court-ordered mediation.

The lesson is the one I give everyone stuck in this spot. File early, keep pushing disclosure and valuation the whole way through, and ask for interim orders if you are truly stuck. Waiting for a stalling ex to have a change of heart is not a strategy, it’s just wishful thinking.

If your co-owner or ex refuses to sign

A sale can reach the point where the orders are made and one person simply refuses to sign the transfer documents. This is not the roadblock people think it is. The court can dispense with that signature and appoint a registrar or another person to sign in the party’s place under section 106A, so the sale still completes (FCFCOA: compliance and enforcement). An interim order can also require the property to be listed for sale in the first place.

Faster and cheaper alternatives

Going all the way to a contested court order is the slowest and most expensive way to do this. Before you commit to it, work through the cheaper routes:

• Negotiate a buy-out. If one of you can refinance, one keeps the house and pays the other out.
• Formalise your agreement through consent orders. If you can agree on the sale or the split, consent orders make it binding without a fight.
• Apply for interim orders to list the property. You do not always have to wait for the final hearing to get the house on the market.
• Use mediation. A structured conversation resolves more of these than people expect.

A word of caution before you reach for a caveat to freeze things while you sort it out.

If you do lodge a caveat and it results in a sale falling through because of that caveat, and it is then found out that that caveat should not have been put on and you didn’t have legal grounds to put that caveat on, then you could end up with a costs order. You could be paying damages as a result of the loss of the sale.

If your co-owner or ex will not move, the honest next step is advice on which of these routes fits your situation before you spend money on the wrong one. That is exactly what our property settlement lawyers are for. Book a free discovery call with me and my team on 1300 614 732, and we will walk you through your options with no pressure and no judgment.