Philadelphia Metropolitan Area Real Estate Law Blog

We are finishing up our discussion of the city’s vacant properties and proposals regarding the Department of Licenses & Inspections’ need for more inspectors. Keeping up with Philadelphia’s enormous inventory of crumbling buildings has proved difficult for the existing 56 L&I employees, and Mayor Michael Nutter’s proposed budget includes funding for more. Even if the money is approved, though, the new hires will only be half as many as the City Controller’s Office recommended in its January report.

We are discussing the added emphasis Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter’s proposed budget will place on building inspections. The proposal includes enough money for the Department of Licenses & Inspections to hire 43 new inspectors, as well as funds to increase staffing at departments that support L&I’s work. In part, this was the mayor’s response to a troubling report from the City Controller’s office about vacant properties in Philly.

The barrier property dispute playing out in New Jersey right now seems to get more complicated with every step forward. We’re still discussing the town of Margate’s efforts to halt the Army Corps of Engineers’ bidding process for the barrier dune/beachfront protection project. The judge denied the stay in January, reasoning that neither party would “suffer irreparable harm” if the corps went forward with the bidding process.

Just finishing up our discussion of a friend’s frustrations with her condominium association. She is president, and the association had to make some major repairs to the garage, which is a common element owned by the association.

We are picking up our discussion about condominium associations and a dilemma a friend found herself in (here). As president of the association board, our friend has been involved with major repairs for her 14-unit, 80-year-old building. Her building is in an urban neighborhood where parking is a problem, but the property includes a detached garage.

We’ll return to our discussion of eminent domain later this week. This issue came up, though, and we promised a friend we would post about it ASAP. Our friend has had a bad week. Aside from being behind on mailing Christmas presents to friends and family — yes, even in January — she had a particularly contentious meeting with her condominium association.

For many Americans, an empty room is simply a space that has yet to be rented to someone who can put it to good use. If you share this sentiment, you may be a landlord to many tenants or you may simply aspire to rent out a single room in your home to someone who can use it more fully than you can. And for someone in need of a place to sleep or to engage in creative work, that space may be uniquely valuable.

We are finishing up our discussion of a case that’s headed to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The court is asked to figure out who owns the mineral rights of a parcel of land.

We are finishing up our discussion of a Pennsylvania case involving mineral rights. The facts of the case look unusual at first. The more we dig into it, though, the clearer it is that this kind of situation could come up again and again. Some of the state’s property laws are centuries old, and some practices that seem rare in other parts of the country are actually quite common here. The case is about one piece of land and the two parties that claim to own it. The heirs of a 19th Century landowner claim t

Say a mining company owns an acre of land in northeastern Pennsylvania. If the company were just to sink a well and start extracting gas from the Marcellus Shale, it could be in trouble with people the company never even knew existed.