If you own real property jointly with another person (or persons) and you want to sell your interest in the property, Maryland law gives you the right to force a sale of the property even if your co-owners don’t agree. Forcing a sale of jointly owned property is accomplished through a special type of court case called a partition sale. I handle a lot of Maryland partition sale cases, so I have a lot of firsthand experience with how they usually unfold and how they can take.
Partition sales are very common. The most common circumstances leading to partition sales are when unmarried couples buy a house together and then break up, or when siblings inherit a house from their parents. The reason partition sale actions are necessary is because selling real property requires all joint owners to agree to the sale. Unlike a bank account or other types of jointly owned property, a house can’t be split into equal shares and divided between the joint owners. So if one joint owner wants to sell their interest in a property and the other joint owner refuses, the only way to resolve this is by getting the court to force the house to be sold.
How Long Will It Take To Force a Sale of Joint Property?
One of the basic questions potential clients always ask when they contact me about a partition sale is how long it will take to get the property sold. There is no simple answer to this because it depends on many different factors. There are really 2 things that dictate how long a partition sale case will take: (1) the cooperation level of the defendant(s), and (2) what county the partition case gets filed in. We will discuss both of these below.
How Long a Partition Sale Takes Depends On Whether the Defendant(s) Cooperates or Resists
Whenever you get to the point of filing a partition sale case, it obviously means that the person you jointly own the house with refused to cooperate or agree to list the house for sale (otherwise the partition sale action would not be necessary). Once the partition sale case actually gets filed, however, many co-owner defendants essentially give in and reluctantly agree to sell the property. This happens in at least half of the partition sale cases I handle. Usually it happens because the co-owners get stressed out by the idea of having to appear in court as a defendant. If the defendant in the partition sale case is still living in the house, they often get anxiety about being abruptly forced out, similar to a foreclosure sale.
Whatever their motivation, when defendants decide to cooperate after the partition case is filed, it always makes things go very quickly. If the defendant agrees to list the house for sale, and sign all the necessary documents, the property can simply be listed and sold while the partition case is pending in the background. I’ve had cases where the defendant immediately gave in and agreed to sell after being served in the partition sale case, and closing on the sale happened barely 2 months after the case was filed. In those situations, the partition case just gets voluntarily dismissed once the property is sold.
While some defendants get cooperative, others tend to have the opposite reaction. These resistant defendant tend to dig in their heels and refuse to cooperate with anything. Usually this reaction comes from defendants who are still living in the property and don’t want to be forced out. Their goal is to stall and drag the process out as long as possible. When this happens, it can make a partition sale take much, much longer. When the defendant refuses to cooperate, it means you have to get the court to forcibly impose every step of the process, from valuing the house to choosing a listing agent. Some defendants will even refuse to sign listing agreements or closing documents, in which case you have to get the court to appoint a trustee to sign for them.
What County the Partition Sale Case is in Makes a Huge Difference
A partition sale case involves the disposition of rights in real property, which means the case must be filed in the Circuit Court for the county where the property is situated (Md. Ann. Code, Cts. & Jud. Proc. § 6-203(b)). So if the property you want to sell is in Montgomery County, you have to file your partition sale case in the Circuit Court for Montgomery County. Each county circuit court has its own timelines and procedures for partition sale cases. Although the overall steps in the process are generally the same, there is a massive difference as to how long this takes depending on the county.
In some counties, a partition sale case can get to the finish line in 6 months no matter how much resistance the defendant puts up. In other venues, however, a partition sale case can easily drag out for 14-16 months and sometimes even longer. The most notoriously slow venues for partition sale cases are Baltimore City and Prince George’s County. Montgomery County is also really slow, but PG and Baltimore City are on a different level. In the next slowest tier are Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County. Frederick, Howard, and Harford Counties are in the second tier. The fastest counties for partition sale cases are Carroll County and Charles County.
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