When One Co-Owner Won’t Sell: Forcing the Sale Through Partition (2026 Edition)

  Co-Ownership Is Climbing and the Forced-Sale Rules Just Shifted Co-owners who once aligned — siblings in an inherited house, unmarried partners on a shared mortgage, investors on a commercial parcel — routinely reach the point where one wants out and the other refuses. Absent a contract governing exit, they sit frozen, and the client lands on your desk with no obvious way forward. That deadlock is now common. Unmarried couples are buying together at record rates, and California’s Partition of Real Property Act, effective January 1, 2023, rewrote the default rules with a mandatory court-ordered appraisal and cotenant buyout…