Paul F. Alphen, Esquire
My cousin Vinnie, the
suburban real estate attorney, accepted my invitation to join some other
captains of industry for a weekend of fishing. The term “fishing” is somewhat
of an exaggeration as
there is more eating than fishing involved. He took me up
on my offer to arrive on the Cape early on Friday so that he could watch me
prep the boat and watch me pump diesel into the tanks. It gave us some time to
catch up on family news, and it gave Vinnie an opportunity to vent about his
suburban real estate practice before the other men arrived.
“Paulie”, Vinnie
started as we backed out of the slip on our way to the fuel dock, “What a week
I had!” Sounding a little like the late Rodney Dangerfield, I fully expected
him to tell me that he “gets no respect”.
“Paulie, honest to Goodness,
this is a short list of some of the issues that entertained me in the last 4
days:
·
A client wants to buy a lot that was conveyed
into a trust with a ch.184 s.35 trustee’s certificate with no mention of
successor trustees, and the trustee since died, and no one can find the trust;
·
A buyer’s attorney instructed me to
prepare a grantee clause in violation of the four unities of joint tenancy;
·
In reviewing a title, I found that our
locus was one of a few lots conveyed years ago with the benefit of a common
driveway easement declared by a party who did not own the servient estate;
·
A portion of a unit, as described in the
Master Deed, is physically separated from the living quarters of the unit, and
stuffed with common mechanicals and pipes, and partially submerged by
groundwater infiltration;
·
A planning board approved a commercial
use across the street from a client’s home in a residential zoning district, in
a town that does not allow use variances;
·
I went to a closing for a seller and the
buyer would not agree to close until she interviewed the landscaping contractor
regarding the methodology used to seed the disturbed area over the new septic
system;
·
A town installed a new drinking water well,
causing a number of homes to lie within a Zone 1, forcing them to install
outrageously expensive septic systems;
·
A condominium burned to the ground;
·
A zoning board told me that my client’s
40B was ‘too dense’, although it meets the boards’ own density guidelines;
·
A landlord gave a commercial tenant
notice that the tenant had to vacate early, and later sent a goon to the
tenant’s space to encourage them to ‘start packin’;
·
A broker that got a commission based
upon a 10 year lease from our landlord client, is now showing the tenant other
space, which will no doubt cause the tenant to breach the lease; and
·
I drove to Dedham for a closing and the
buyer did not show, and days later nobody can find him.”
I had to laugh and tell
him that I understood, all too well. “Vinnie, when we tell people that we are
real estate attorneys, they think we make a living sitting at a closing table passing
loan documents to homebuyers; I am sure that’s what my sisters think I do. In
reality it is impossible to describe what we do. Sure, our practices are real
estate related, but we also take care of issues that touch, directly or
indirectly, real estate… sometimes very, very indirectly. And all of them could
be better defined as ‘human issues’, as opposed to ‘real estate issues’.”
Vinnie wandered over to
the Yeti with the big BC logo on top and pulled out an IPA that had its roots
in Nantucket, but is now brewed on the mainland somewhere. He felt better,
having vented, and he paused to enjoy the passing scenery and the sunshine as I
pushed down the throttles to leave terra firma behind.
