Philadelphia Metropolitan Area Real Estate Law Blog

We have been talking about the different kinds of property rights, particularly mineral rights and the rights to the land above mineral deposits. Pennsylvania is dealing more and more with issues like this now that advances in technology have made the Marcellus Shale easier to tap into. Mineral rights were easy to ignore or to forget about when they were not worth anything. Now, there is a lot of money at stake.

In the last couple of posts, we have discussed how the law treats property ownership. Property rights are commonly described as a “bundle of sticks,” and a landowner can lend or sell or duel over one stick or a combination of sticks. When a landowner grants his neighbor an easement with a reversionary right, for example, he essentially loans a couple of sticks from his bundle to his neighbor for as long as his neighbor needs them; when his neighbor no longer needs them, the sticks go back to the landowner.

It is hard, some days, not to think of Dr. Seuss when we are flipping through real estate cases. The expression from “Horton Hatches the Egg” is usually the first to come to mind: “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent.” Property and contract law would be a lot easier, though much less interesting, if everyone would just say what they mean and mean what they say.

We are talking about a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in March 2014. The case — Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States, shorthanded as “Brandt” — was a win for property owners. And we are not just talking about homeowners. The ruling also protects the rights of businesses that own land along abandoned rail corridors.

In March 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an important decision about property rights. The case, Brandt v. United States (formally known as Marvin M. Brandt Revocable Trust v. United States, 134 S. Ct. 1257, 188 L. Ed. 2d 272 (2014)), was about abandoned railroad rights-of-way that had been turned into public recreational trails.

Do you wonder why people like to be scared? Why haunted houses are so popular at Halloween? A friend from the Midwest tells us of a house where a notorious murder took place there about 30 years ago. The house is now a museum, a tribute to robber baron architecture.

We are circling back to our discussion about a homebuyer’s lawsuit against the seller and the seller’s real estate agent. After the sale was completed, the buyer discovered that a notorious murder had taken place in the home. She sued, claiming that the defendants had an obligation to tell her about the home’s history.

We talk about zoning and land use disputes all the time. A friend pointed out that those posts are generally about lawsuits or disagreements between landowners or between a landowner and the city. What we have devoted less space to are disputes between buyers and sellers. A recent Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling has come to the rescue.

New Jersey could be losing patience with property owners in communities along its coastline. The state has asked for easements, but the property owners are balking. The easements would give the Army Corps of Engineers enough room to erect barrier dunes along the beaches, dunes that would protect homeowners and businesses during a storm like Sandy. The dunes would also block the property owners’ views of the beach, or so they argue.

The Philadelphia Department of Licenses and Inspections has been trying to right itself since the fatal demolition accident in June. When that wall collapsed on the Salvation Army Thrift Store, city officials launched an investigation into L&I’s demolition permitting process and found more than a few flaws. A review of the department as a whole is underway; it should be in Mayor Michael Nutter’s hands in July (see our Nov. 1, 2013, post for more information).