BELTLINE LITIGATION – 2003 TOP TEN CASE OF NOTE
The Top Ten Real Property Cases of 2003
By Steven D. Atlee & David A. Campbell
©2004. All Rights Reserved.
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On appeal, the court noted that the Statute of Frauds requires contracts for the sale of real property to be in writing. To satisfy the Statute of Frauds, the memorandum affecting the sale of real property must describe the land so that it can be identified with reasonable certainty. When one party is a municipality; as in this case, a statute or ordinance can serve as the required memorandum.
The 22-acre rail yard at the center of this dispute was not owned by either party in 1924 and was not specifically described in the initial repurchase option. The court stated that the critical legal issue, then, was whether the Statute of Frauds bars admission of parol or extrinsic evidence showing a delineation of the property that occurred after the execution of the contract.
In resolving this issue, the court relied on a federal district court opinion from North Carolina that involved a similar contract option. There, the railroad had the right to select the spe-cific parcels of land for future operations, which thereafter were not specifically described in the agreement itself. A century later, a dispute arose over whether the agreement violated the Statute of Frauds, but the district court concluded that the contract was made sufficiently definite by the railroad’s subsequent selection of the property.
The California court in this case accepted that reasoning and held that the Statute of Frauds may be satisfied where the contract provides that a buyer will select and acquire certain lands after the original written contract is executed, so long as extrinsic evidence shows which lands were in fact acquired. This is the “means or key” used to define the relevant land, in accordance with that general preference of California law to avoid invalidity under the Statute of Frauds.