Selling a home in a divorce or separation is a normal sale wrapped in an abnormal situation: two instructing clients who may not be speaking, a price that one party may want high and the other fast, and a completion that has to fit a financial settlement. Handled with some structure, none of that need cost you money. This guide covers the practical side; the legal side belongs with your family solicitor, and it is general information rather than advice.
The ground rules that make it workable
Agree three things at the start, in writing between you, however informally: that both of you instruct the sale and both approve the price, based on written evidence rather than either side's hopes; how viewings will run, which matters when one of you still lives there; and that offers are reported to both of you at the same time, which we do as standard. An agent who lets one party manage the sale alone serves neither of you, and we decline to work that way.
Confidentiality helps more than people expect. Buyers who scent a distressed sale bid accordingly, so the marketing simply never mentions the circumstances, and neither do we. Where feelings are running high, we can run everything by email so each of you has an identical record.
Price, timing and the settlement
The valuation does double duty in a separation: it prices the marketing and it often feeds the financial disclosure, so it needs to be written and evidenced, which our free valuation is. Timing then belongs to the settlement: sometimes the order is sale first and division after, sometimes one party is exploring buying the other out, and a mortgage question sits inside that, which Trent Finance can quote on properly. Where the parties need the sale done and the arguing kept apart from it, the fixed timetable of an auction sale occasionally serves better than a negotiation neither side has patience for.
Our fee is the published 0.8% with a £1,800 minimum on the Sell your home page, our correspondence treats both clients identically throughout, and Trent Law Solicitors, though it cannot act for both of you in the divorce itself, can handle the conveyancing of the sale in the usual way.
