For sellers — situation

Selling a Downtown Condo When You're Divorcing: The Practical Sequence

If you're in the middle of a divorce and you and your co-owner also need to sell a downtown condo, I want to talk to the actual situation you're in, not a generic market overview. This is about getting the order of decisions right so the sale doesn't become another source of friction.

Where You're Standing Right Now

You own a downtown condo with someone you're divorcing, and at some point that home has to be sold, transferred, or bought out. Whatever the eventual outcome, most paths run through the same event: the condo goes on the market and gets sold to a third party.

I'm not going to tell you how to divide the proceeds or what your settlement should say. What I can help with is the practical side once you've decided a downtown condo sale is part of the plan: how to sequence the steps so the process runs smoothly for both of you.

Why Sequence Matters More Than Speed Here

In a normal sale, I'm often focused on how quickly we can get a condo ready and listed. In a divorce sale, speed matters less than getting the order of decisions right. Move too fast into listing before certain things are settled, and you end up redoing work, or worse, renegotiating in front of buyers.

The sequence I recommend is: agree on terms first, then list, then manage showings under agreed rules, then handle closing logistics. Skip a step or do them out of order, and friction between co-owners tends to surface at the worst possible moment, usually once there's an offer on the table.

What Has to Be Settled Before the Condo Goes on the Market

Before I'll recommend listing your downtown condo, I want a few things settled between you and your co-owner. Not because I need it for my own process, but because leaving these open invites the exact rework I mentioned above.

Who represents the sale day to day, meaning who I'm coordinating with on price adjustments, offer decisions, and paperwork. How proceeds will be split once the condo sells. And how showings and communication between the two of you will be handled while the home is active. Each of these logically comes before a listing goes live, not alongside it.

Choosing an Agent Both Owners Can Work With

When two owners are no longer aligned as a household, having two separate points of contact for the same sale multiplies the chances of mixed signals reaching a buyer's agent. This might be a risk if you decide to sell without an agent. I recommend one agent, agreed to by both of you, as the single channel for listing decisions, offer negotiations, and buyer communication.

That doesn't mean either of you loses a voice in the decisions. It means the information flows through one place instead of two, so an offer or a repair request doesn't arrive differently depending on who a buyer's agent happened to reach first.

Handling Showings and Closing When You're Not Living Together as a Team Anymore

If you're both still living in the downtown condo, or one of you has moved out and the other hasn't, showings need clear rules: who grants access, how much notice is given, and what happens if a showing conflicts with either of your schedules. This is coordination, not negotiation, and it works better decided once rather than argued each time.

Closing carries the same logic. Signing logistics, who's present, how documents move between you, all of it goes smoother when it's mapped out ahead of the closing date rather than figured out that week. The goal is a closing where the sale itself is the only thing left to finalize.

Roz Dupiton