Commercial Real Estate Legal Questions

Your experience is why I always advise clients to have us review their closing package before the closing.  You may still be able to sort our what went wrong there. And it sounds like you should consult an attorney about the buyer’s behavior.  It may have violated the land contract and the buyer’s behavior would lead me to expect additional breaches in the future.  While you may have the right to take enforcement action, it is possible that the buyer’s changes were for the better so, while the buyer needs to be warned to comply with the land contract in the future, and to get you proof of insurance, you will want to evaluate the impact of what he has done before deciding to take enforcement action at this time.... Read More

There is no law requiring a spouse to sign a lease of any kind.  This may be required by the landlord as a condition to agreeing to lease the property.  That's entirely appropriate and quite common.  I'm not saying its either fair or adviseable.  if you won't sign, the landlord might simply decide to not lease the property.  The proposed tenant can try to offer the landlord some other type of "security" such as pre-payment for some portion of the lease, a pledge of other assets, etc. ... Read More

You would contact a real estate attorney to represent your father to sue the general partner for an accounting, partition, breach of contract, breach of fiduciary duty, intentional interference with an economic advantage, and any other causes of action that he may have.  Contact an attorney for a full consultation.... Read More

I think the first step here is to review your lease and see what it says about the situation.  You should certainly send a written demand to the landlord detailing what you left on premises, demand that the LL safe keep it and demand that you be able to recover it by a certain date.  How much is the stuff worth?  You have to weigh the costs of a legal proceeding vs. value of the items to decide if they're worth pursuing. ... Read More

If this is your attorney, its certainly a reasonable request.  If this charge for an opposing party's attorney and is something you are being asked to pay as part of a contractual provision of some kind, you can certainly ask for details but I suspect you won't get a substantive response because the attorney will say that to do so would require releaving confidential information protected by the attorney client privilege.  But there's no harm in asking.  You could have another attorney review it and see if the time billed appears to be too much for the likely services.  For example if the charge was for preparing a letter enclosing a copy of a pleadiing of some kind and the charge was for one hour, that would look fishy to me.... Read More

Most attorneys are skeptical of working on a case/client issue for a set price.  This is because they do not know how long or how intricate the case/client issue will be, and our time is our livelihood.   However, if the projects are a series of component and duplicative parts, a set fee per project is certainly something that can be negotiated.  The issue lies when there is a particular project that goes sideways on all, and the attorney is stuck working for months for free because he/she agreed to a set price but did not anticipate the enormous amount of extra work (time).  ... Read More

Generally, in a condominium as defined in California, the association is required to repair utiliies that serve more than one unit.  However, the developer may have allocated repair duties differently in the Declaration (CC&Rs) for the project.  You will need to have the CC&Rs reviewed by an attorney to determine how repair obligations are divided. ... Read More