To estate agents, mortgage lenders and buy-to-let investors must be added another group of credit-crunch victims: warring couples. Among the increasing number of unsold homes on the market are those of would-be divorcees who would go their separate ways if only they could dispose of the family home.

Research conducted by Savills estate agency for The Sunday Times shows a link between the strength of the housing market and the number of marital break-ups. Bar a small blip in 2000, the number of divorces rose steadily from 1999 to 2003 - when house prices were rising at their fastest rate – before subsiding in 2005. There was then another small rise as the market began a short-lived recovery.

With sales and prices now collapsing, Lucian Cook, the agency’s head of residential research, believes the housing market may succeed where the church and marriage counsellors so often fail: persuade couples to stay together.

“Looking back over 10 years, there is a correlation,” he says. “When couples can afford to divorce and buy elsewhere, they do so. When the market is slow and they can’t afford to sell, they are more likely to stay together.”

Denise Knowles, who has been a relationship counsellor with Relate for the past 18 years, is anticipating a rush of calls from unhappy couples forced to remain at the same address. “It is what happened during the last property slump, when people reached the conclusion that their relationship was over, then realised they were in negative equity and couldn’t sell,” she says. “One couple put little coloured stickers on all the kitchen drawers to remind each other whose was whose.”

One woman, who asked not to be named, said she spent three years living under the same roof as her exhusband, a compulsive gambler. In all that time, they didn’t exchange a word. “We used our teenage children as go-betweens whenever we needed to discuss any domestic issue,” she says. On better terms were Penny and Alan Brooke, who solved their differences by splitting their Yorkshire home down the middle – only for the local council to demand two sets of council tax, on the basis that it was now two dwellings.

The pent-up marital problems of the last property crash appear to have led to a divorce boom in 1993 – when the housing market, at least in London and the southeast, emerged from the perma-frost. A record 180,000 divorces were recorded that year. On the positive side, Knowles remembers several couples whose marriages were saved by the slump. “Being forced to live under the same roof, they had to address issues they would otherwise have walked away from,” she says.

There hasn’t always been a correlation between divorce and the strength of the housing market – between 1985 and 1989, when prices were booming, the number of divorces gently subsided from 175,000 to 165,000 a year – but the nature of divorce has changed in the past two decades. The number of divorcees in their twenties and early thirties has plummeted – inevitably, because fewer young people are getting married in the first place. The number of those involving couples in their fifties, on the other hand, has soared. It is these late divorces that are most likely to involve a valuable family home, and therefore to be influenced by the state of the housing market.

Divorce has been a money-spinner in recent years for estate agents, particularly at the upper end of the market. Nearly one in four property sales between £2m and £4m handled by Savills in the southeast is caused by divorce, Cook says. The number of divorces in the fifty-something age group is perhaps less influenced by the general state of the housing market than by the relative cost of large and small houses.

In the late 1990s, Cluttons estate agency noticed a spate of divorces in Wandsworth, southwest London. At the time, the top of the market was doing better than the bottom end, with the result that detached family homes – which usually sell for twice the price of small terraced houses – were selling for three times as much. Consequently, couples were apparently reasoning that if they split up, they could afford to remain in a decent, if smaller, home in the same area.

The picture is further complicated by the fact that not all parties to divorce actually want to sell up. Indeed, some will go to great lengths to avoid being thrown out of a property they have come to love rather more than their spouse. In one sale handled by Savills a few years ago, the husband, who had moved out of the family home, wanted to sell it, but his estranged wife did not. As a result, every time a viewing was arranged, she would blast potential buyers with funeral music.

In another case, in Pangbourne, Berk-shire, a husband was traumatised by having to leave his Victorian cottage. “He took a chain saw to the joists, sawing through every stair and floorboard,” says Katherine Singleton, of Dudley Singleton & Daughter. “He poured cement into the septic tank, took out the kitchen sink and taps, smashed the bath and toilet. We got the impression that he didn’t want to leave.”

Savills’ figures run contrary to reports from America, where some divorce lawyers say they are enjoying a boom as wives rush to divorce their husbands before their wealth evaporates in the credit crunch. Raoul Felder, a New York lawyer who has represented Rudy Giuliani and Mike Tyson’s former wife in divorce cases, says that he has had to hire extra staff to cope with his cases, which have risen from 250 to 300 over the past year.

Felder, however, tends to deal with the superwealthy, who have large property portfolios – not with your typical British divorcing couple, who are stuck in a family home with nowhere else to go.

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