If you operate a liquor store at a shopping center, would you like to be the only one there? Of course, you would. It isn’t like a dress shop where other stores would have different styles and price points and those other dress shops will bring you business as well. But, when it comes to wine and liquor, everybody carries the same core items. Some will skew their wine offerings in one direction; others may have a different wine focus. But, when it comes to wine and liquor, all merchants have the same merchandise available to them and all can sell whatever everyone else sells.
So, it will come as no surprise that a large-scale liquor store at a shopping center negotiated and was granted some exclusive use protection. This is exactly what its lease provided: [Read more…]
Is it masochistic to want to read court decisions? Given that most of society frowns upon masochists, it’s probably good that very few of us who create transaction documents actually read any such decisions. [That’s sarcasm.] It seems to us that what we do is engage in some “on the job training,” but mostly we rely on the wisdom of our ancestors – those who wrote the documents we use as templates. If today’s blog posting were a sermon then, fortunately, we’d be preaching to the choir. You, our readers, by being such and, almost certainly, by your reading of more erudite materials than these postings, are, unfortunately, the exception in our chosen field. Today, Ruminations salutes you.
There is so much to say about purchase rights: straightforward ones, rights of first refusal, rights of first offer, rights of last offer, and rights of first notice). There is so little time to do so. [For those with time to spare, click
We don’t know if there are more ways to write a purchase option in a lease “wrong” than right,” but we do know opportunities abound. Here are a couple of examples. The first is based on a statement of California law within a court opinion from March of 2018. [See it by clicking: 
Seek and ye shall find isn’t always true. An example will be today’s blog posting. We’ll raise some issues but offer no solutions. Today is audience participation day. If so inclined to publically offer some thoughts, the comment feature at the bottom will be your ultimate destination.
Sometimes a party has the right to withhold its consent when the other party requires that party’s consent. And, sometimes the right to deny consent is desired to be absolute and unconditional. In such cases, and for a very long time, Ruminations has been using a formulation saying that such consent “may be withheld for any reason or no reason at all.” We just read a June 28, 2019 Supreme Court of Texas decision possibly chastising us for wasting those words. After analyzing a contract provision stating simply that a party could not assign its rights “without the express written consent” of the other, that court wrote that the added words, “for any reason or no reason,” were surplusage. As that court wrote, consent-required provisions with or without the extra words have identical meaning. Accordingly, “the same can be said” as to a provision reading that consent “can be granted or withheld at [a party’s] sole discretion.”
We’ve always been a little murky as to whether a successor landlord always becomes obligated to pay renewal commissions to the original broker responsible for the presence of an existing tenant. After all, there is no actual agreement between that later landlord and the broker whose original commission agreement calls for the payment of a renewal commission. The broker can’t point to where it and the successor landlord “shook hands.”
What is a “reasonable time” for something to happen or to get done? Do we ask this question of ourselves when we use that phraseology in our leases and other agreements? We can’t avoid using concepts such as “reasonable,” “material,” “promptly,” and the like, but are we being as careful as we should be when sprinkling them around?
Follow Us!