Liquidated Damage Remedy Or Just A Bargained For Higher Rent?

Print

Though today’s posting isn’t really about “radius restrictions,” that’s what’s behind today’s observations about liquidated damage lease provisions. A radius restriction is a restrictive covenant. Thus, they have to be reasonable as to distance, duration, and scope. We’ve seen few modern cases centered on those parameters. So, we think restrictions that are coterminous with the lease term are reasonable as to time. Distances corresponding with a shopping center’s market area also seem reasonable. Limiting their scope to a lease’s use clause also seems to pass muster. [Read more…]

Print

Rights, Powers, And Forgiveness – Let’s Loosen Up

Print

Today, we’re going to engage in some pure Ruminating. Most of the time, we (and others who are deeply engaged in this side of the “business”) focus on the “documents.” We think about how they are drafted and often mis-drafted. We read articles and (in “olden” times”) participate in programs focused on how better to do our “job.” But, there are some “rules” that get short shrift. These are rules that regularly have more force than do laws.

One is that there is a difference between having the “right” to do something that is required (or to abstain from doing something) and the “power” to do that thing (or not). Another comes in two versions: It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission; and it’s easier to apologize than to get permission.

The success of either approach might be related to another aphorism: Might makes right. Each reveals two deficiencies found even in the best-crafted agreements. There aren’t enough trees in the world (proverbially speaking) to create enough paper to contain all of the words needed to regulate every possible permutation of conducts or situations. And, much of what we write (and agree-upon) just plain isn’t important; the provisions aren’t really needed. [Read more…]

Print

How Can One Enforce A Continuous Operation Lease Provision? Not Easily.

Print

Rarely will a court enforce a continuous operation obligation by ordering a tenant to stay in business at its leased space. Yet, from time to time a landlord will seek an injunction to force a tenant to keep its store open. A simplistic explanation as to why courts don’t issue such orders is because landlords need to show an irreparable injury, and if a landlord can be compensated by the payment of money, its injury isn’t irreparable.

Landlords confronted with a tenant bound by a covenant to be “open and operating,” but on the verge of breaching that obligation by closing its store, usually plead the “domino effect,” expressed by Benjamin Franklin thusly: [Read more…]

Print

Can You Evict A Tenant For Failure To Carry Required Insurance?

Print

Ruminations hasn’t researched commercial eviction law as it exists in every state, but wherever it has, one principle stands out. Eviction is an equitable, not a legal, remedy. Courts don’t have to evict a tenant and won’t do so for minor defaults. This approach is a subset of a legal “equitable” maxim: “Equity abhors a forfeiture.” A tenant’s “leasehold estate” is a property interest, and taking away a valuable property over a triviality is not what courts are supposed to do. Volumes have been written about this (and other) legal maxims. Not here; not today.

As to evictions, what varies from court to court, even in the same jurisdiction, is what judges consider to be “minor.” We’ll illustrate that today using “failure to maintain lease-required insurance coverages” as an example. [Read more…]

Print

Liquidated Damages: How Much Is Too Much?

Print

Imagine a landlord delivers promised space 84 days beyond the target delivery date, and the tenant gets 755 days of rent credit. That’s a little over two years’ of free rent for a delay of a little less than three months. Is that appropriate? Is it lawful? Is it a proper measure of damages? Is it a penalty imposed on the landlord? At the end of March, a federal judge in Pennsylvania, applying New Mexico law, answered the legal questions. She ruled that the 755-day rent credit was an acceptable approximation of damages and was not an unenforceable penalty. Ruminations has no argument with the court because, when it comes to whether an agreed-upon damages provision in a lease is enforceable, the unvarying answer is: “It depends.” [Read more…]

Print

How Gross Are “Gross” Sales? And More.

Print

A few weeks ago, we wrote about the distinction between “rights” and “remedies,” but in somewhat theoretical or even esoteric terms. Today, we’ll present a situation that demonstrates a practical intersection of the two. Our story comes from an April 24, 2020 decision from the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York. [That’s New York’s name for its intermediate appellate court.]

Imagine a mall with approximately 150 tenants. One of those tenants (and possibly others) was listed as a “Named Retail Tenant” or as a “Suitable or Successor Replacement Anchor Store,” a “Required Tenant” or “Upscale Tenant” in the “co-tenancy” provisions within the leases of many other tenants at the mall. Basically, if this “Named Retail Tenant” left the mall, dominos could fall. [Read more…]

Print

Rights Without Remedies: Moratoriums And Real Estate

Print

If blog postings, law firm memorandums, newspaper articles, televised pundits, and the like were effective medications for COVID-19 infections, this crisis would be over. Without even asking readers, we know that all of you are inundated with reliable [and less than reliable] information and guidance about this virus and how to deal with it. Unfortunately, more and more, it seems like we’re hearing Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith and Don Reno performing “Feudin’ Banjos” on their seminal 1955 recording. We don’t play the banjo. Therefore, we won’t be joining the COVID-19 legal advice band today.

 

One thing, however, bothers us more than the many others. We’ve seen a lot of words speculating on what “laws” were needed. Some opinions have been sage. Many have been uninformed. What bothers us is that much of what we are reading ignores or blurs the difference between “rights” and “remedies.” Almost all lawyers know the following; many of our other readers may not. One way to explain what is going on is to use an example that comes right out of our current news. An increasing number of jurisdictions are legislating (or administratively imposing) rent relief for (usually only residential) tenants. [Read more…]

Print

Why Are Obnoxious Holdover Rents Enforceable?

Print

Is a holdover rent of 200% or even 150% an unenforceable penalty or does it just give the tenant an option: pay it or leave? Earlier this month, a California appellate court answered that question for its jurisdiction, but not without a lengthy analytic dissent.

To get us all on the same page, here are some ground rule definitions. “Holdover” by a tenant means it stays in the space, without its landlord’s consent, after the term of its lease expires. [For a lengthier exposition, click HERE for an earlier blog posting.] As to whether such a cranked-up rent constitutes enforceable, agreed-upon, liquidated damages or an unenforceable penalty, we need to review what constitutes legitimate liquidated damages. That’s because if an agreement, such as a lease, specifies an amount to be paid by a party upon breach of its agreement, that agreed-upon amount needs to be a reasonable estimate, made at the time of agreement, of what the damaged party would lose upon such a breach in a situation where the damages, if calculated at the time of the breach, would definitely exist, but would be very difficult to calculate exactly. [For a lengthier exposition, click HERE for yet another earlier blog posting.] [Read more…]

Print