What is “selective enforcement”? For almost a thousand years, and up until almost the 20 th century, England tried hard to tame the unruly Irish. The Penal Act made their religion a crime, punishable at the King’s discretion. Sometimes the King decided the punishment was beheading, sometimes he made no punishment at all. That’s selective enforcement. Is there any mystery that Thomas Jefferson ...
By now you know the setting for this question. Robert owns a parcel which he uses for both residential and commercial purposes. The buildings have serious structural deficiencies that are not obvious to one not familiar with the property, but that Robert and his friends know very well. His circle of friends includes a real estate broker and a lawyer. Robert wants to sell the property to get away ...
Remember from my last article that the law provides that a seller of Residential Property must disclose unknown defects to a purchaser. The facts were that Robert lives on a parcel that has a small bait and tackle shop and his residence, located on the River. Robert has lived and worked on the property for many years. You are his Realtor, and has been your friend for many years. He has grown tired ...
Robert lives on a parcel that has a small bait and tackle shop and his separate residence, located on the Choctawhatchee River. Robert has lived and worked on the property for many years, and has been your friend for many years. He has grown tired of resurrecting the property annually because the river floods, damaging both buildings and the land. He does such a good job repairing the damage that ...
I can’t say “don’t get there”, because some have no choice, and some will be in foreclosure or become short-sellers not by choice but by other considerations that are just as compelling. Whichever is true, don’t rely on advice someone else pays for. Sometimes a lawyer can’t help. There’s enough at stake that I always advise hiring your own lawyer. But even if your lawyer can’t help, he or she will ...
Not many lawyers started out as both a licensed plumber and electrician. I didn’t really want to, but my dad was both, and because he was, I was. Along the way, I found myself in The University and then the Army, but my mind never got far from where I started. I learned that when you weld a joint, you must weld the back side too. If you don’t, even though you can’t see the back, the job will come ...
This is an article about property ownership. It expresses a unique and important, yet misunderstood, method of joint property ownership in Florida. I have sat as a member of a bank finance committee; the purpose of the committee was to evaluate requests for loans from borrowers based upon loan applications and financial information presented to loan officers. I was the committee’s only lawyer, and ...
Every day we look at a contract. We either write it, we read someone else’s contract and try to understand it, or someone reads our contracts for the same reasons. Part of the frustrating reality of a contract is that it is almost impossible to write one of any complexity at all and have any two people agree on what every part of it means. This article is about the dumbest of all contract ...
The real estate market is on drugs, and we all know it. We don’t even want to analyze it because we are afraid that whatever the magic is, it will disappear when we try to understand it. One thing we do know, though, is that good times and bad make people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. An example is the subject of this article. A condominium reservation agreement is a document we all ...
