It’s been a while since we wrote about rules of contract construction or about the consequences of dilatory behavior. Now, we’ve just seen a September court decision from the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota that gives us a good opportunity to cover both. As a bonus, it deals with a lease’s continuing co-tenancy provision.
The co-tenancy provision was pretty typical. In principle, to be an “Anchor Tenant” meant almost any “large, well-known national or regional retail store.” A co-tenancy failure was where certain identified space at the shopping center lacked such an Anchor Store for 120 days. Absent such an Anchor Store for that period, and if certain other conditions existed, the tenant with the continuing co-tenancy right could begin to pay “Alternative Rent” equal to the lesser of the lease’s stated rent or 3% of its gross sales. None of that was at issue at the Minnesota shopping center. The landlord agreed that the tenant’s co-tenancy right had been triggered and that it would be entitled to pay Alternative Rent, but for one issue. It claimed the tenant waited too long to exercise its right to the reduced rent. It wasn’t because an Anchor Tenant was found for the empty space. It was because the now-gone Anchor Tenant had vacated at the end of July 2016 and the claiming tenant, after paying full rent for 30 months, made a $250,000 retroactive claim in January 2019 for excess rent paid. [Read more…]
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We’ve written about “exculpatory” clauses before. The on-line version of Black’s Law Dictionary explains such clauses as follows: “An agreed-to condition (1) preventing blame or liability on one party due to the improper behavior of the other party; (2) preventing liability on one party due to not meeting all of the contractual performance expectations.”
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.”
A 25-page court decision out of the Supreme Court of British Columbia has triggered today’s blog posting. The decision describes a convoluted, time-extended, back-and-forth negotiation over a set of interrelated, broker-prepared offers to buy and sell. In that marketplace, such documents signed by the offering party and “accepted” by the other one become “contracts of sale and purchase.” The back and forth with these documents began in early February, After a number of handwritten changes and the addition of a couple of pages, they were finally “accepted” in late July.
We’ve been doing Ruminations since 2011 and yet this is the first time we’ve deliberately done a multi-topic blog posting. Generally, when we choose a topic (400+ thus far) we dig in and treat(?) our readers to several pages of our ramblings. That approach has precluded our covering simple or easily contained topics, ones undeserving of deep drilling down. So, today, for the first time (but, perhaps not the last), we present a little of this and a little of that.
Can a new landlord sue a tenant for unpaid rent from before closing? Can it evict the tenant based on that unpaid, pre-closing rent? An Illinois appellate court says “No” to each question. And, it awarded attorneys’ fees to the delinquent tenant.
A restaurant’s lease permitted leasehold mortgages with the following proviso:
It’s been a while since we’ve pointed out that, using the words employed by a California court in 2001, “[a] lease of real property is both a conveyance of an estate in land (a leasehold) and a contract. It gives rise to two sets of rights and obligations – those arising by virtue of the transfer of an estate in land to the tenant (privity of estate), and those existing by virtue of the parties’ express agreements in the lease (privity of contract).”
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