Blog Posts: Real Estate

Owning a piece of land without any means of accessing it is akin to owning a car without the keys.  While the absence of access to land, like the absence of keys to a car, does not have any impact on the fact of ownership, it obviously has a huge impact on the value of what is owned.  With that in mind, let’s consider the several ways that a landowner may have ...

When people think of a contract, the first thing that usually comes to mind is a written contract, whereby the contracting parties have put into writing what each of them is promising to the other.  For example,  If you want to have your trees cut, and ask the tree trimmer to do the job, the tree trimmer may provide you with a written contract, which sets forth s...

A basic truth about contracts is that once the contracting parties have come to a meeting of their minds regarding the terms of their contract, absent some overriding law, such as one that makes the contract illegal, or some other reason why an unambiguous contract should not be enforced literally as written, the courts will not substitute their own business judgme...

As hard as real estate agents, title companies, attorneys, and anybody else who drafts contracts, may strive for perfection in their drafting, it is not unusual for the finished product to include a provision that is ambiguous. Such ambiguity can result from a poor choice of words, or from an "honest mistake" made during the drafting process. According to Black's L...

One of the great things about being a real estate agent is that when a transaction closes, the agent gets paid his or her commission regardless of how much time and effort expended by the agent in connection with the transaction. Commission is usually computed as a percentage of the sales price. The other side of that coin, of course, is that the agent does not g...

When a commercial tenant leases space in a shopping center or mall, a primary consideration for the tenant is the expected benefit to their business of the foot traffic from the customers that will be attracted to the other businesses being operated by their neighboring tenants. This is particularly true when the neighboring tenant is the “anchor,” or o...

In the not-so-distant past, if you wanted to get from one place to another without a car of your own, you would call a taxi, with your only choice being which of the many taxicab companies to call upon. Now, of course, calling a taxi is scoffed at as being “old fashioned” and overpriced, with many, if not most, people opting to instead call Uber or Lyft...

It is commonplace for an owner of real estate to convey their property from one entity that they own or control to another that they also own or control.  There are many reasons for such transfers, including, most commonly, the desire to hold a particular property in a "single purpose entity" in order to satisfy a lender's requirement, or to attempt to shield the ...

As a general rule, if somebody owns something, whether it is as small as a cell phone or as big as ten-acre parcel of land, no one else may use it without the owner’s consent. There is, however, a notable exception to such rule found in the legal concept of prescriptive easements. While there are various types of prescriptive easement claims, such claims ofte...

A “Dragnet Clause” in a Deed of Trust is a provision that states that the Deed of Trust secures any and all future debt owed by the borrower to the lender, in addition to whatever debt the Deed of Trust originally secured. The use of the terminology “dragnet” symbolizes that such a clause causes the Deed of Trust to “spread” like...