“I’ve been trying to sell this house for two years,” Chris Wealty said. He dropped the price from $850,000 to $599,000; still no interest. The house sits empty, once home to a married couple. They are trying to divorce, but settling the financial terms depends on selling this house in College Park, a neighborhood north of Orlando, Florida.

So he decided to advertise. On a large (and not very attractive) sign in the front yard, he wrote “3,400 sqft Lake View House: $599,000. Helping me get divorced: $ priceless $. 407 592 4964 (Husband)”

As he told the Orlando television station WESH, he and his wife had been married for 17 years, and had been in negotiations for several years over a divorce settlement. The house is in one of the nicer areas, former orange groves surrounded by lakes near the well-known Winter Park. It is not far from the modest bungalow where Jack Kerouac wrote Dharma Bums, a home that is now a writer’s colony.

But a nice four-bedroom, three bath house, a pretty view, a good neighborhood have not been enough. Housing prices in Orlando, which went up 34 percent from 2004 to 2005, have now dropped by 20 percent. One leading real estate expert, Robert Schiller, says Orlando prices will drop another 30 percent this year.

Thus Wealty’s desperation. If he doesn’t sell the house soon, he said, he faces foreclosure. One of his neighbors opined that putting up a sign airing dirty laundry was kind of “white trashy,” so the experiment hasn’t endeared him to the community. But his life, and his wife’s life, have moved on.

When asked what his soon-to-be-ex wife thought of the sign, Wealthy answered: “Well, to tell you the truth, I'm not real sure. We don't talk much these days except through lawyers.”

No kidding.

The house on one side is up for sale, and has been for a long time. On the other side, the house has already been foreclosed. Now, statistics in Australia say, if you are facing divorce, chances are your house is going to be up for sale too, within the next two years.

A study by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute looked at home ownership among couples who stayed together and couples who broke up.

Not surprisingly, home ownership fell from 69 percent to less than 50 percent in the two years following a couple splitting up. What was surprising was that home-ownership rose to 90 percent in couples who stayed together.

Professor Gavin Wood, from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, told “The Sydney Morning Herald” that, within one year of separation, people spending more than a third of their income on mortgage payments rose from 3 percent to 34 percent.

“So,” he said, “within a year of breaking up, you have a third of these people in mortgage stress.” That is often the wife, who usually is the one to keep the family home.

Some 20 percent of divorced women sell their house to pay for retirement, the study found, twice the number of men who does the same thing.

Men, the study found, are more able to make adjustments in housing costs, even if he “falls out of home ownership.”

Another study by the same institute, in 2004, showed that divorced and separated people had a lower probability of attaining home ownership, compared to those who remained married. But those who divorce and remarry were found to have the same chance of home ownership as those who remained continuously married.

Meet Louise Rush and Alan Bamberger, of San Francisco. They were divorced six years ago, but they still live in the same 2,700-square-foot Victorian house. She takes a downstairs bedroom, he takes an upstairs one, where he is close to their two sons. Lisa Belkin wrote an 8,000 word article “When Mom and Dad Share It All” in The New York Times Sunday magazine on June 14. But she didn’t have room for the Bambergers or another divorced couple that has split responsibilities amicably, even after divorce. You can read about them here on her blog about equally shared divorce.