A 2016 law created a regime in Arizona that barred cities from regulating short-term rental properties. This bill was passed based on the convincing idea that doing so would keep cities from barring residents from making a bit of extra money by letting out a room or occasionally renting their properties on one of the increasingly popular home-sharing sites, such as AirBnB, while they were out of town. Read More
The landlord-tenant relationship generally has the potential to be a fraught one. It’s not surprising when you think about it: the arrangement is an intermingling of one person’s property rights (the landlord’s) with the locus of someone else’s daily life and the concepts of habitation and privacy that go along with it (those of tenants). When those concepts are overlapped, resentment has a way of cropping up. It is this complex relationship that has led to laws on various levels—federal, state, and municipal—that attempt to honor both sides. Disclosure laws, for example, require that a landlord give a potential tenant notice of conditions in their lease properties that may be problematic. Read More
Ever since Sun City was founded back in the 1950s, Arizona has been a haven of sorts for Homeowners Associations. These organizations, which make and enforce the rules regarding properties and residents of a given planned community, subdivision, or condominium, are considered in many cases to be vital to maintaining the value of homes under their control. But they do come at a cost: not only must one who purchases or rents into a community with a homeowners association bound by the rules that apply to them, but there is generally a monthly fee (or “dues”) either added to one’s mortgage or paid separately to cover the activities undertaken—and amenities provided—by the homeowners association. And the homeowners association can take possession of your home if you don’t pay that fee. Read More
There’s a popular saying coined by Robert Frost in his poem “Mending Wall”: “Good fences make good neighbors.” The idea is, generally, that this eases the ability for neighbors to respect one anothers’ property by taking the gray-zones out of where one parcel ends and another begins. (It’s amazing how angry people can get when a neighbor simply mows one row beyond where they believe their property begins.) But this proverb (so to speak) does beg the question: when there’s a fence sitting right on the property line, who does it belong to? Who is responsible for its care? For repairs? Read More
Restrictive covenants come in various stripes, but in real estate law they can most broadly be considered an agreement that requires one party to a contract (usually a buyer) to either take a particular action or to abstain from a particular action. These covenants are generally adopted as part of the purchase, and are written into the deed of the property. Those who purchase the property and fail to follow these covenants become subject to penalties. Read More
Many people purchase property in Arizona with an eye for the surrounding aesthetics. Mountainsides, valleys, and rock formations in the environs of one’s home can, in fact, be a large reason that individuals decide to purchase a particular property, or, for that matter, that business-owners purchase or lease a particular property. (Think, for example, of a restaurant that provides a view of Camelback Mountain. That ambiance may well be a strong reason for such an establishment’s success.) So when an adjacent property owner decides to develop their property so that it threatens the view, some property owners or tenants will wonder whether they have any recourse. The answer is “probably no,” with a limited yes. The “yes” portion has to do with what are known as “view easements.” Read More
Like 46 other states (as well as DC, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands), the state of Arizona has adopted the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (“UETA”). This Act, published in 1999 by the Uniform Law Commission, was designed with the express intention of giving the same effect previously given to handwritten signatures under the statute of frauds to electronic signatures. Read More
Documents that affect the viability of—or that validate—a loan are likely to contain something called a “savings clause.” Savings clauses are inserted into contracts to ensure that the contract will remain as intact and enforceable as the law will permit, even in the case that some portion of the document is determined unenforceable by a court or otherwise invalidated. These clauses can refer to the entire contract, or to specific provisions within a given contract. They are intended, in other words, to serve as a source of relative certainty—even in the sorts of situations where uncertainty may be at issue. These clauses are also at times referred to as “severability clauses”—reflecting the intent by the parties to request that a court “sever” (cut away or render inert) whatever portion of the contract the law must deem invalid while maintaining the rest of the agreement, and even to indicate particular portions of the contract that they would favor to have severed, as against others (the ones they would most like to “save”). Read More
Zoning of a geographic area in Arizona is performed by city and county governments with the goal of maintaining the health, safety, and economic solvency of the community found there, and to control the rate of an area’s growth. The zoning ordinances and land use regulations applied to a given area govern the ways in which the land within it may be used, and may even regulate the appearance or size of buildings found there—including the building materials used to construct them, the distance buildings must be from the roads, and even the height or colors in which they may be rendered. Some of these zones are designated “commercial.” Read More
One of the core underpinnings of our system of real property is that when an owner of property is divested of some portion of that property, they will naturally want to receive some form of compensation in exchange. Which is why some people find themselves shocked to learn that Arizona honors the concept of “adverse possession”—sometimes referred to colloquially as “squatter’s rights.” Read More
