Real Estate Insights
Analysis and practical guides on real estate.
70 articles, checklists, and guides on real estate law, written by the attorneys at MC Law. Every piece is general information, not legal advice—for a specific matter, contact the firm.
Title Review and Real Estate Closing Checklist: A Practical Checklist
Real estate closings fail on items that were disclosed weeks earlier in a document nobody read line by line. The title commitment's Schedule B-I is a task list with owners and dates, and its Schedule B-II is a set of risks that must each be classified as acceptable, requiring information, requiring cure, or deal-affecting. This checklist converts both into a working process, adds the survey ordering and Table A selections that reveal the problems a title search cannot, sets out the endorsements worth buying in a commercial transaction, and runs the closing itself—including the wire verification step that prevents the most common uninsured loss in the industry. It ends with the funding, recording, and policy review that confirm the cure actually happened.
Handling a Landlord-Tenant Dispute: A Practical Guide for Tenants and Landlords
This guide runs a landlord-tenant dispute from both chairs, in the order events actually happen. The tenant track covers reading a lease before signing, documenting move-in, making a repair request that creates a usable record, choosing among repair remedies without defaulting, responding to a notice, filing an answer, preparing for a hearing that will last ten minutes, and recovering a deposit. The landlord track covers lawful screening, a compliant lease, repair response that defeats a habitability defense, serving notices that survive scrutiny, proving a case, and executing a writ without committing a lockout. A shared section covers negotiation, mediation, rental assistance, and where to find free help.
Commercial Leases for Small Businesses: What to Negotiate Before You Sign
A commercial lease is usually the largest fixed obligation a small business signs and the one it understands least. It is not governed by the consumer protections that apply to apartments, the landlord's form is written entirely for the landlord, and the terms that determine whether the deal is affordable are rarely the rent number everyone negotiates. This article explains what actually matters. It covers the letter of intent and why the real negotiation happens there, the difference between gross and net structures and how common area maintenance charges become uncapped exposure, the rentable versus usable square footage measurement that silently raises the effective rent, and the personal guaranty that turns a corporate obligation into a family one. It then works through the operational clauses: use and exclusivity, assignment and subletting and why they decide whether the business can ever be sold, tenant improvement allowances and who owns what at the end, repair and maintenance allocation, casualty and condemnation, holdover penalties, and the subordination and estoppel provisions the tenant signs without reading. It closes with a negotiation priority list, a due diligence checklist, a worked example, an FAQ, and related reading.
Structuring a 1031 Like-Kind Exchange: A Practical Guide
A like-kind exchange defers the gain on the sale of investment real estate if the transaction is structured before the sale closes and every deadline is met. The rules are unforgiving in a specific way: the taxpayer may never have the right to receive the proceeds, the replacement property must be identified within forty-five days, and the exchange must close within one hundred eighty days, with no extensions available for a missed identification. This guide covers what qualifies after the 2017 restriction to real property, how the qualified intermediary safe harbor works and what destroys it, the identification and timing rules with their exact arithmetic, how boot and debt relief create taxable income even in a completed exchange, and the reverse and improvement structures for situations where the replacement comes first. It closes with related-party traps and state-level clawbacks.
Residential Landlord-Tenant Law: Leases, Habitability, Deposits, and Eviction
Housing is the area of law where the most people have the most at stake and the least information. A residential lease is a contract, but it is a contract overlaid with statutes, an implied warranty that cannot be waived in most states, and an eviction process built for speed rather than deliberation. This article explains what a lease actually promises, where the implied warranty of habitability came from and what it requires, the four remedies a tenant has for a landlord who will not repair, how security deposits are regulated, why self-help lockouts are illegal nearly everywhere, how summary eviction works and what defenses actually win, and what happens after a judgment. It is written for tenants, for landlords, and for the lawyers and judges who see these cases in volume.
Buying a Home: Contract, Inspection, Title, Financing, and Closing
A home purchase is the largest transaction most people ever enter, conducted on a form contract, on a compressed timeline, with the parties represented in some states by lawyers and in others by no one. This guide walks the transaction in order. It covers the offer and the purchase agreement, including the contingencies that are the buyer's only real protection and the deadlines that silently waive them. It then addresses seller disclosure and the limits of an as-is sale, the inspection and what to do with what it finds, title review and what an owner's policy does and does not cover, and the survey that turns title exceptions into a picture. Later sections cover financing and the federal disclosure timeline, homeowners association documents, the closing itself with a line-by-line review of the settlement statement, and the post-closing steps people forget.
Construction Project Toolkit: A Roadmap for Owners
An owner building a project is buying a promise about the future from parties whose interests diverge the moment anything goes wrong, and the owner's leverage is entirely front-loaded. Almost every construction dispute traces to a decision made before the first shovel: the delivery method, the completeness of the design when the price was set, the schedule provisions nobody enforced, and the lien waiver process that was never run. This toolkit follows the project in order: selecting a delivery method and understanding what each does to risk, engaging the design professional, structuring the price, the contract provisions that decide claims, insurance and bonds, running payment and change control, closing out, and resolving disputes. It is written for owners who build occasionally rather than continuously.
Real Estate Development Toolkit
Development is a sequence of options in which the developer buys time to answer questions before committing capital, and the failures are almost always a question answered too late. Title exceptions discovered after closing, an environmental condition found after the innocent landowner defense was lost, an entitlement the site could not obtain, a construction loan that funded before the equity was documented. This toolkit follows a project from site identification through disposition: structuring the acquisition with the diligence period and the deposit at risk, running title and survey and environmental review, obtaining entitlements, assembling the capital stack and the joint venture, financing and building, achieving stabilization, and exiting. Each stage identifies the decision that must be made before the next one begins.
Contesting a Property Tax Assessment: A Practical Guide
Property tax is the largest recurring cost of owning real estate, it is assessed by a local official using mass appraisal methods, and it is wrong often enough that a review is worth doing every year. The appeal process is administrative first and judicial second, the deadlines are short and jurisdictional, and the standard of review favors the assessor through a presumption of correctness that the owner must overcome with evidence rather than argument. Two distinct grounds exist and they require different proof: that the assessment exceeds market value, and that it exceeds what comparable properties bear, which is a uniformity claim available in most states. This guide covers how assessments are produced, how to evaluate whether one is wrong, the evidence that actually persuades, the procedural sequence, and the exemptions and classifications that are frequently more valuable than a valuation appeal.
Environmental Liability for Businesses and Property Owners: CERCLA, RCRA, and Diligence
Environmental liability is strict, joint and several, and retroactive, which means a business can be responsible for contamination it did not cause, did not know about, and that was lawful when it occurred. This article explains the regimes that produce that result and the defenses that limit it. It covers CERCLA in detail, including the four categories of potentially responsible parties, the arranger and operator theories that reach beyond the current owner, and the landowner defenses that depend entirely on having conducted all appropriate inquiries before acquisition. It then covers RCRA's generator obligations and corrective action authority, its citizen suit provision, and the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act obligations that most often surprise ordinary operating businesses. Later sections address transactional diligence and allocation, brownfields and state voluntary cleanup programs, environmental insurance, successor liability, and emerging contaminants including PFAS.