Selling property co-owned with ex

I own half of a property with my ex and want to get the value out. However, he is refusing to sell. What can I do?

Your first step is to review your divorce papers carefully. Most will order that one spouse deed the property to the other but do not effectuate transfer of the property in the judgment.

If this is the case, you need to get your ex to sign a deed now. If your ex does not want to do this, you may need to reopen the divorce case and ask the judge to enforce its ruling by holding your ex in contempt. This is time-consuming and expensive but almost always works. It can be more difficult if your ex is nowhere to be found, but you can accomplish it through the court. With this headache in mind, people with a pending divorce are well served to either get the judge to include the actual transfer of the property in its ruling or to make sure your ex signs a deed while signing the rest of the mountain of paperwork.

If the co-owned property was not dealt with in the divorce, either purposefully or because you forgot to include it, you need to move forward like any other joint property owners and to file a partition lawsuit. In this type of case, the judge looks at the circumstances of the purchase and ownership of the property to decide what is a fair way to split it. This usually requires that the property be sold, any debt be paid off and the remaining equity be shared accordingly, although the judge may allow one party to buy out the other if that is what they want to do.