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.

Prof. Wood also pointed out that relationships where the woman earns more than the man are more likely to end in divorce. Professor Wood’s next study is on the affect of divorce and loss on housing and finances for people over the age of 50.

"That could be because a woman who earns more than the man may be more prepared to leave an unhappy relationship,” Professor Wood said. “They are more able to start again.”

In Australia, the median length of a marriage was 12.5 years in the 2005 Census, and women are more likely to file for divorce than men.