Commercial landlords have, in the past year and a half, dealt with many novel issues in relation to COVID-19, often on an emergency basis. Few landlords have had to deal with both public health order violations and gang crime relating to the same tenant, as in a recent decision of the B.C. Supreme Court, Ivy Lounge West Georgia Limited Partnership v. TA F&B Limited Partnership, 2021 BCSC 997 ...
The final phase of the Esterra Park development in Redmond, Washington, is a carbon-neutral development. Schwabe client JTM Construction is the general contractor for that project. As attorneys, we are interested in staying up to date on market trends, so we asked JTM to put together a panel to brief Schwabe’s Real Estate and Construction industry group on the carbon-neutral aspects of the project ...
An adjudicator’s jurisdiction is central to their ability to determine a dispute between two parties; without it, their decision will be invalid and unenforceable by a court. Conversely, if an adjudicator has jurisdiction, then, as the Court of Appeal has repeatedly emphasised, that adjudicator’s decision must be enforced, even if it results from errors of procedure, fact or law ...
It is a well-established rule of the Housing Grants, Construction and Regeneration Act 1996 (the ‘Act’) that an adjudicator will only have jurisdiction to determine one dispute under a construction contract at any one time, unless their jurisdiction has been extended by consent of the parties ...
In a judgment handed down on February 16, 2021, in a case involving former de facto spouses, the Superior Court dismissed an interlocutory injunction filed by the plaintiff seeking the eviction of the defendant from what had been their common residence. After having lived together in a de facto union for 32 years, the parties separated. The plaintiff, sole owner of the family residence, left the residence while the defendant continued to live there ...
Net zero targets now cover in excess of two thirds of global GDP and over a fifth of the world's largest public companies, according to the latest report published by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit and Oxford Net Zero. This global shift towards net zero has reshaped the development landscape with demand for sustainable buildings being driven not only by regulators, but by investors and occupiers ...
In early April as the statewide vaccination rate began to rise and major population centers across California began to see significant decreases in positive COVID cases and hospitalization rates, Governor Gavin Newsom announced that the State plans to reopen in full on June 15, 2021. As of the date of this Alert, California has one of the lowest number of COVID cases per 100,000 people and the fourth lowest number of COVID hospitalizations in the United States ...
In a judgment of 22 April 2021, the European Court of Justice found that a lease contract entered into between an Austrian authority and a real estate company before the construction of the building did not constitute a contractual building contract, as the authority had not had a decisive influence on the design. The authority's requirements thus did not exceed the requirements that a tenant usually places on a building of a similar nature ...
Ownership of mines and minerals separately to surface land poses a risk for developers that must be assessed and mitigated as appropriate. It is not uncommon for mines and minerals to be owned separately to the land at the surface and in certain areas of the country, particularly the north, it is frequently encountered ...
This blog post highlights certain amendments to British Columbia’s Real Estate Development Marketing Act (“REDMA”) Policy Statements 5 and 6 which came into effect May 1, 2021. Policy Statement 5 sets out circumstances under which a developer is deemed to have permission to begin early marketing of a real estate development before a building permit is issued for the development ...
The Oregon Senate will soon be deciding on a bill that would allow an owner of a lot or parcel at least two acres in size in an area zoned rural residential to build an accessory dwelling unit, or “ADU,” on that lot or parcel, provided there is already a single-family dwelling on the lot or parcel ...
It is a truism to say that infill development in Oregon is fraught and expensive. This is apparently not lost on the Legislature, which over the past four years has enacted a number of laws to reduce local permitting barriers on infill projects in an attempt to provide for more affordable and middle-income housing ...
The government has published its much-heralded Bill to outlaw the payment of ground rents under long residential leases. Background The payment of ground rents by residential tenants of long leases has become something of a cause celebre, particularly where leases include ground rents that double every five, ten or twenty years making those leases less valuable and potentially unsaleable ...
The Court of Appeal has unanimously held that a tenant’s statutory declarations given to landlords were valid even though they did not specify the precise term commencement date of the leases to be contracted out. Landlords will be relieved that the Court of Appeal did not adopt an overly legalistic and commercially impractical interpretation of the contracting-out requirements ...
For some years, contractors and subcontractors have been using an effective tactic in adjudication. That is to pick off discrete elements of a large time or money claim and to obtain a series of favourable declarations in adjudications on those elements. The declarations can then be used as a bargaining tool to leverage a settlement of the full claim. Or they can be converted into payment orders by way of a further adjudication ...
The government is consulting on a proposal to introduce a new UK-wide tax for residential property developers from 2022, with a view to generating revenue to cover the costs associated with the removal of unsafe cladding. The measure is intended to generate at least £2 billion over the course of a decade, which the government says is a “fair contribution” to the overall cost of the remediation programme ...
In a recent case, the Upper Tribunal decided that land benefitting from a restrictive covenant was greater than the land which had the legal benefit. An application to release the covenant was, accordingly, refused ...
The pandemic has, if nothing else, demonstrated how much more needs to be done in the battle against climate change. Despite the worldwide economic slowdown and travel ban resulting from coronavirus, global carbon dioxide emissions reduced by just 6% (approximately 2.3bn tonnes) in 2020. But both governments and industry are responding to the challenge, however, with a renewed sense of urgency and collaborative spirit ...
We all need our town centres. But more than that, we need our town centres to work better for us. As consumers grow increasingly comfortable with online shopping, the realisation that our towns are over-reliant on retail is being played out at a national level. No longer can we expect empty retail units to be snapped up by new tenants in a matter of weeks ...
Key Points The California Court of Appeal has issued the first published opinion interpreting California Senate Bill 35's (SB 35) new laws that streamline the approval of much-needed housing projects. Under SB 35, qualifying housing projects are eligible for ministerial review, which can reduce entitlement processing times by months if not years. In Ruegg & Ellsworth v. City of Berkeley (Cal. Ct. App., April 20, 2021, No ...
The COVID-19 Pandemic has wreaked havoc on the mortgage servicing industry, putting significant strain on both mortgage servicers and their borrowers ...
If the COVID-19 pandemic affected the value of your property, Ohio Senate Bill 57 (S.B. 57) may offer you (or your triple-net lease tenant) a chance to reduce your Ohio real property taxes not available under prior law. Property tax valuation complaints in Ohio counties can be filed only once in each three-year interim period, and property values are determined as of January 1 of the tax year. Because the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S ...
Acting under its new Debt Collection Licensing Act licensing administration and enforcement authority granted by SB 908, the DFPI Commissioner issued a public statement on April 9th reminding all future license applicants under the Debt Collection Licensing Act of California’s renter protections associated with COVID-19 rental debt ...
Led by Anna Lowe, this short and sharp session covered recent updates in tax affecting real estate. 1. VAT and the Reverse Charge Applies from 1 March 2021 to supplies of building and construction services where the Construction Industry Scheme would apply ...
