Property Law and Real Estate Commons^™

A Golden Opportunity For New York: Caveat Emptor And Revised Mckinney's 465, Grady Miller

NYLS Law Review

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For centuries, the doctrine of caveat emptor has governed New York residential real estate transactions, rewarding sellers who do not disclose material defects affecting the property, and punishing unsuspecting buyers who fail to exercise due diligence. To alleviate the doctrine’s inherent unfairness to buyers, the New York …

Facilitating Mortgage Modification To Save Homes And Mitigate Lender Losses, Julia Patterson Forrester Rogers

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

Homeowners in financial distress or whose homes have been damaged by natural disaster may avoid foreclosure if their lender agrees to modify the loan to reduce payments. Commercial loans may also be modified to avoid foreclosure or in response to changed circumstances or changing market conditions. Although loan modifications are generally beneficial to both borrowers and lenders, barriers to modification exist. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has addressed some of the roadblocks to residential loan modifications by regulating the procedures that mortgage servicers must follow in dealing with delinquent borrowers, but the CFPB and its regulations are at risk …

Maine's Action To Try Title: A Proposal For Statutory Reform, Eve Hlavatý Cimmet

Maine Law Review

Maine law provides three distinct statutory proceedings to try title: the real action, an action at law to quiet title, and an action in equity to quiet title. As the preceding Comment demonstrates, the present statutory scheme preserves outmoded distinctions between law and equity that are functionally obsolete in modern civil practice. Although the statutory law governing actions to try title in most states is, like Maine's, a patchwork product replete with archaic concepts, several other states have consolidated legal and equitable remedies into simple, comprehensive statutory actions. This Comment proposes a similar statute for Maine in the interest of …

Maine's Actions To Try Title: A Historical Perspective, Gregory W. Powell

Maine Law Review

Actions to try title are commonly used by Maine lawyers to adjudicate real estate title conflicts. Though often time consuming, expensive, and complicated, such actions are necessary in any state that seeks to foster a stable, economically efficient real estate market. Actions to try title have been necessary in all states because no protective statutory scheme for land titles has ever succeeded in eliminating all title defects that interfere with quiet possession or salability. Maine is no exception. Until a more effective statutory scheme for securing titles and restoring land's marketability becomes available, actions to try title will remain important …

Property And Prejudice, Fatma E. Marouf, Vanessa Casado Pérez

Faculty Scholarship

“Alien land laws”—laws restricting noncitizens from owning real property—are back. A dozen states have enacted such laws during the past year, and over thirty states have considered such bills. These new bills are rooted in xenophobia, much like their predecessors, but they also have unique characteristics. They single out governments, citizens, and corporations of specific countries perceived to pose a threat; they impose ownership restrictions based on arbitrary distances to U.S. military bases and critical infrastructure; they inflict particularly harsh penalties; and they try to ferret out foreign control in complex corporate structures. The purported justifications are national defense, food …

Overloading The 1% “Circuit Breaker”: The Indiana Tax Court Constitutionally Expands Curtilage, Andrew W. Swain

Texas A&M Journal of Property Law

In its 2024 decision, Sawlani v. Lake County Assessor, the Indiana Tax Court reviewed the constitutionality of the Indiana General Assembly’s statutory limit of the constitutionally prescribed 1% tax cap to only one acre of land—curtilage—surrounding the taxpayer’s principal place of residence. The Tax Court held the legislature’s limitation unconstitutional, finding no verbiage in the relevant constitutional provision that justified limiting the tax cap to just one acre. This Article critically examines the Court’s decision in Sawlani, arguing that the ruling represents a significant departure from established judicial principles and legislative intent, undermining the legislature’s authority and introducing …

A New Framework For Condominium Structural Safety Reforms, Stewart E. Sterk, Reid K. Weisbord

Articles

Forty years after the widespread popularization of residential condominium ownership in the United States, millions of Americans now live in aging, densely occupied structures that are subject to little (if any) ongoing regulation of structural safety. Most structural safety requirements are imposed and enforced at the time of initial construction, thus relegating questions of how to maintain a building’s structural integrity to individual owners and the mechanisms of condominium governance. However, reliance on voluntary action by unit owners too often falters because the divided ownership characteristic of the condominium form deters associations from investing in preventive maintenance. Postponement of critical …

Title Theft, Stewart E. Sterk

Washington and Lee Law Review Online

Real property owners across the country have been targeted by scammers who prepare deeds purporting to convey title to property the scammers do not own. Sometimes, the true owners are entirely unaware of these bogus transfers. In other instances, the scammers use misrepresentation to induce unsophisticated owners to sign documents they do not understand.

Property doctrine protects owners against forgery and fraud—the primary vehicles scammers use in their efforts to transfer title. Owners enjoy protection not only against the scammers themselves, but generally against unsuspecting purchasers to whom the scammers transfer purported title.

Recovery of title, however, involves costs and …

Blockchain Real Estate And Nfts, Juliet M. Moringiello, Christopher K. Odinet

Faculty Scholarship

Non-fungible tokens (popularly known as NFTs) and blockchains are frequently promoted as the solution to a multitude of property ownership problems. The promise of an immutable blockchain is often touted as a mechanism to resolve disputes over intangible rights, notably intellectual property rights, and even to facilitate quicker and easier real estate transactions.

In this Symposium Article, we question the use of distributed ledger technologies as a method of facilitating and verifying the transfer of physical assets. As our example of an existing transfer method, we use real property law, which is characterized by centuries-old common law rules regarding fractionalized …

The Doctrine Of Unilateral Severance And Its Potential Development In Singapore, Zhi Jia Koh

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Co-ownership of land is commonplace in Singapore, and the manner of holding among co-owners has important practical implications. Joint tenants are subject to the rule of survivorship, but what if a joint tenant does not wish to be locked into the survivorship wheel of fortune? A joint tenant may unilaterally sever the joint tenancy by an act operating upon his or her share of the land, but questions remain as to when that occurs and the consequent duration of severance. This article attempts to address these questions with the current alienation-based approach and suggest the possibility of an intention-based approach.

Mitigating Catastrophe Risk For Landowners, Stewart E. Sterk

Articles

Local, national, and global catastrophes entail significant risk for landowners. The government-sponsored National Flood Insurance Program illustrates how subsidizing insurance against catastrophe risk can result in overinvestment in risk-prone properties. Government intervention, however, has largely been a response to the historical failure of the private insurance industry to provide adequate protection against correlated risks, a failure with the potential to generate underinvestment in land and devastate existing owners.

When data is available about the incidence and severity of potential disasters, improvements in technology have made it more feasible for insurers to calibrate premiums and discounts with greater accuracy, and sophisticated …

Alabama Association Of Realtors V. Department Of Health And Human Services, Adam B. Mcdonald

Tennessee Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Critical Jeffersonian Mind For A Community Reinvestment Bind, Chaz Brooks

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 ("CRA") primarily sought to remedy decades of government sanctioned disinvestment in so-called “redlined communities.” Through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation and later the Federal Housing Administration, the United States of America created from whole cloth a structure that encouraged and subsidized the explosion of homeownership in white American households. Following decades of racialized wealth generation, the United States had a change of heart. Congress determined that financiers needed a gentle push to invest fairly. Additionally, Congress wanted one thing clear in the drafting of this remedy—it must not allocate credit.

This essay considers how …

Examination Of Eviction Filings In Lancaster County, Nebraska, 2019–2021, Ryan Sullivan

Nebraska College of Law: Faculty Publications

The study examined and analyzed eviction filings and proceedings in Nebraska, with a specific focus on Lancaster County—the home to the State’s capital, Lincoln. The primary objective of this study is to place eviction proceedings under a microscope to gain a better understanding of the volume of evictions in Nebraska, and whether the statutorily mandated processes are being followed. The study also attempts to capture the impact of certain external factors present during the period examined. Such factors include the COVID-19 pandemic and various eviction moratoria in place during 2020 and 2021, as well as the increased availability of legal …

The History Wars And Property Law: Conquest And Slavery As Foundational To The Field, K-Sue Park

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article addresses the stakes of the ongoing fight over competing versions of U.S. history for our understanding of law, with a special focus on property law. Insofar as legal scholarship has examined U.S. law within the historical context in which it arose, it has largely overlooked the role that laws and legal institutions played in facilitating the production of the two preeminent market commodities in the colonial and early Republic periods: expropriated lands and enslaved people. Though conquest and enslavement were key to producing property for centuries, property-law scholars have constructed the field of property law to be largely …

Restricting Funeral Expense Deductions, William A. Drennan

Dickinson Law Review (2017-Present)

During the Middle Ages, the wealthy often requested burial in mass graves with their fellow mortals, as a sign of humility. But since the rise of the cult of the individual during the Renaissance, individual burial plots have been an expression of prestige, wealth, and social status for some. For example, Leona Helmsley, real estate baroness and “Queen of Mean,” dedicated $3 million upon her death for the care and maintenance of her 1300 square foot, $1.4 million mausoleum. Respectful disposition of the body is a hallmark of civilization and a common law requirement of estate administration, but an extravagant …

A Timeshare By Any Other Name: Fractional Homeownership And The Challenges And Effects Of Commodified Single-Family Homes, Christopher Markuson

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

Jordan V. Flammond, 21-Ap-01 (Blkft. Tr. Ct. App., Aug. 9, 2021), Blackfeet Appellate Court

Court Decisions

In the Blackfeet Tribal Court of Appeals, the Court dismissed an appeal regarding the ownership of a home in Babb, MT. The Appellate Court noted that it will not overturn a judgement based upon factual findings unless a review of the entire record shows that such judgement was not supported by substantial evidence.

Spatial Distribution Of Property Sales Using Geographic Information Systems: A Case Study Of Riyadh, Abdulaziz Aldegheishem, Abdulrahman Abalkhail, Saleh Alhumaydani

Emirates Journal for Engineering Research

This research demonstrates the importance of representing and making data available on the map for urban areas in terms of contributing to raising the transparency index of the real estate sector and facilitating the process of accessing information, by reviewing some studies that dealt with it, its history, uses, and some examples. This paper presents a model based on geographic information systems that combines property sales data and a map of land division according to location and time for Riyadh city, the case study, and explains how to find a common link for different real estate data for land assets …

Race And Property Law, K-Sue Park

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This chapter offers an outline for understanding the key role of race in producing property values in the history of the American property law system. It identifies major developments in the mutually formative relationship between race and property in America that made and remade property interests in America through the processes of 1) dispossessing nonwhites, 2) degrading their homelands, communities, and selves, and 3) limiting their efforts to enter public space and occupy or acquire property within the regime thereby established. First, it describes the use of law to create the two most important forms of property in the colonies …

Toxic Bones: The Burdens Of Discovering Human Remains In West Virginia's Abandoned And Unmarked Graves, J. William St. Clair, Robert Deal

West Virginia Law Review Online

This article pulls up and highlights a land use restriction, or financial burden, imposed upon West Virginia private real estate owners who inadvertently uncover human skeletal remains in unmarked graves on their property. In this state, those coming across human bones that historians and archaeologists eventually deem have no historical or archeological significance have a choice—pay the costs to have the bones removed and reinterred or cover the bones and use the property only as a cemetery in perpetuity. This burden becomes more acute when comparing West Virginia’s law to those of other states that require government officials, at public …

In West Philadelphia Born And Raised Or Moving To Bel-Air? Racial Steering As A Consequence Of Using Race Data On Real Estate Websites, Nadiyah J. Humber

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Caveat Emptor: Real Property Law’S “Get Out Of Jail Free” Card V. The Property Condition Disclosure Act, Alessandra E. Albano

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Privatizing The Reservation?, Kristen A. Carpenter, Angela R. Riley

Publications

The problems of American Indian poverty and reservation living conditions have inspired various explanations. One response advanced by some economists and commentators, which may be gaining traction within the Trump Administration, calls for the “privatization” of Indian lands. Proponents of this view contend that reservation poverty is rooted in the federal Indian trust arrangement, which preserves the tribal land base by limiting the marketability of lands within reservations. In order to maximize wealth on reservations, policymakers are advocating for measures that would promote the individuation and alienability of tribal lands, while diminishing federal and tribal oversight.

Taking a different view, …

Bad Foundation: Washington's Lack Of Homeowner Rights, Brendan Williams

Mitchell Hamline Law Journal of Public Policy and Practice

No abstract provided.

A River Runs Through It: The Jobs Act’S Course Through Crowdfunding, Towards Stable Returns On Investment In Real Estate, Devin Finlayson

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

O'Donovan V. Mcintosh: Changing The Contours Of Maine's Easement Law, Michael J. Polak

Maine Law Review

In O'Donovan v. McIntosh, a real estate developer, Timothy O'Donovan, brought an action seeking, in part, a declaratory judgment concerning the transferability of an easement that he purchased from the defendant, John A. McIntosh, Jr. O'Donovan and McIntosh subsequently filed a joint motion for partial summary judgment to obtain a ruling that would affirm the assignability of the easement in question. Susan Huggins, the owner of the servient estate upon which the easement in question imposed, objected to this motion as a third party defendant. She filed a cross-motion for summary judgment maintaining that the easement in question was not …

Property: Preoccupation With Occupancy: Defining "Residential Tenant" Under Minnesota Statute Section 504b.375—Cocchiarella V. Driggs, Lisa Cline

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Evolution Of E-Commerce In Virginia Real Property Transactions, Ronald D. Wiley Jr.

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Transactional Real Estate Law: From Contract To Closing, Jacqueline A. Revis, Ronald Brown

NSU Law Seminar Series

This particular seminar is designed to educate attorneys about how to process a real estate transaction from contract to closing, focusing on the current rules and regulations for financed transactions.

• How to competently act as a closing agent for a real estate transaction in Florida
• Review requirements of a title agent
• Discuss difference between being only a title agent and the additional role representing a particular party (buyer or seller)
• Understanding the new closing disclosure form and the difference between a buyer closing disclosure and a seller closing disclosure
• Handling special challenges that arise in the context of real estate …