Finding yourself facing the specter of foreclosure is one of the more stressful events that can occur in a homeowner’s life, even being linked to lowered mental and physical health status in people going through it. That said, many homeowners in distress who receive notice from their mortgage lender that foreclosure proceedings are to be initiated are woefully hesitant to take any effective action. This is a mistake. Read More
Claims over interests in real estate in Arizona are recorded with the recorder’s office of whichever county the property sits within. So long as an individual follows the technical requirements to a satisfactory degree, they can record an interest. It is not up to the county recorder to make determinations of validity or fraudulence. Which means that, in the state of Arizona, it is surprisingly easy for unscrupulous parties to record a false document. From time to time crooks do things like file false liens, or forge deeds that appear to convey a property, and so forth. Read More
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
Everyone has that one neighbor – the neighbor who doesn’t cut their lawn, who leaves their trash or recycling bin on the street way after the pickup has come, whose mail sticks out of their mailbox, or whose Amazon boxes stay on the porch for days. If you can’t think of that neighbor, it’s probably you. Everyone can get frustrated or have disagreements with their neighbor, especially in a time we are all at home more. It almost feels like we are Jimmy Stewart in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Rear Window, imagining vast conspiracies by the couple across the street. 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
