§ 704.740.Sale of Dwelling to Enforce Money Judgment

This section is the gateway between a bare judgment and an actual forced sale of someone's home. As a general rule, a creditor cannot sell a natural person's dwelling to satisfy a money judgment without first getting a court order for sale under this article, and the dwelling's exempt status has to be worked out through this article's process.

There's a narrower path for two situations where the full court-order procedure doesn't fit as well: when the dwelling is personal property (like a mobilehome not attached to real property, or a boat) or when the debtor's interest is a leasehold with less than two years left on it at the time of levy. In those cases, no court order for sale is required, and instead the exemption gets claimed and decided through the standard judgment-debtor exemption procedure in Article 2, starting at § 703.510.

The distinction matters practically: most homeowners with a fee interest in real property get the fuller protections of this article's hearing process (§§ 704.750-704.800), while shorter-term or non-real-property dwellings are routed through the more general exemption-claim mechanism used for other kinds of property.