A Washington state Senator is demanding answers from a real estate company that’s signing homeowners to decades-long list-and-sell contracts for as little as $500 dollars.

Read More [See related article 40-year right-to-list contracts concern pros in Michigan real estate, deeds]

MV Realty of Delray Beach is offering contracts — called the Homeowner Benefit Program — that pay up front money to homeowners whether or not they have plans to sell their home, information on the company’s website states.

Read More [See related article: $1,350 in exchange for an exclusive, decades-long real estate deal? A Washington State Senator has questions.]

Gov. Steve Sisolak said Thursday that Nevada lawmakers should take up the issue of real estate transfer taxes next session, in the wake of Review-Journal reporting that shed light on numerous high-priced sales that didn’t produce a dime of such revenue.

Many privately held limited liability companies (LLCs), corporations and other entities formed or registered to do business within the U.S. will soon be required by federal regulations to file reports to disclose their beneficial ownership and to update those reports to reflect changes to their beneficial ownership on an ongoing basis.

Memo to attorney closers: Get rid of the overstuffed leather chairs, box up your lobby's legal library, and take down the myriad of diplomas on your wall. Consumers don't care, and a growing number of them won't visit your office anyway! In this episode, FNF's Chuck Cain welcomes South Carolina attorney Gary Pickren, who shares how he continuously improves the customer closing experience. And Gary's tips work for independent title agents too!

Week Ending April 1, 2022

The Supreme Court of Utah recently denied the appeal of a group of landowners (the “Landowners”) who sought to invalidate restrictive covenants imposed on them by a homeowners’ association as violative of public policy.

A small parcel of land in central Oahu is the site of another standoff between a group claiming ownership of the land based on Native Hawaiian ancestral rights, and a company holding the modern land title.

In a case over a failed home auction, the New Jersey Supreme Court determined real estate auctions are not the same as typical property transactions and do not require a three-day attorney review.

Is it worth spending extra dollars, days, and windshield time to discover what mischief your oil and gas operator might be making on your property? The landowner-plaintiffs in Mustafa v. Americo Energy would certainly say so.

The “discovery rule” offered them no help in their suit against their lessee for negligence when visible soil contamination occurred over two years before suit and was filed and the landowners had not visited the property in over six years. The two-year statute of limitations barred the landowners’ claim.

Many of us have fond memories of visiting our grandparents at their summer property, whether at a beach house on Cape Cod or in the middle of the woods in the Berkshires. But what happens to this property once your grandparents (or parents) die? Who gets to decide how a summer property is maintained or distributed? The death of older generations can result in many competing interests – children, grandchildren, a grandparent’s significant other – from which unanticipated problems can arise.

Farmers, ranchers and other rural landowners face many legal and tax issues on a daily basis. The type of legal issues varies, and some are cyclical. Others seem to repeat over and over. In today’s article I discuss two cases from Kansas that illustrate some of the issues that seem to come up frequently with respect to real estate, and one that arises on a cyclical basis. 

(DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has announced the unsealing of a first-of-its-kind indictment involving a digital asset “insider trading” scheme.[1] The indictment charges Nathaniel Chastain, a former product manager for OpenSea—the largest online marketplace for non-fungible tokens (NFTs)—with one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering. 

A lot of people are still confused about what the metaverse is, and even more confused about what it’s going to be. Despite the initial rush to buy up metaverse property, there’s no doubt that the buzz has cooled off among many industries. 

Canada and Denmark have reached a settlement in a decades-old border dispute over Hans Island, a 1.3-square-kilometre rock in the Arctic sea passage between Greenland and Ellesmere Island, sources say.

Findings challenge some commonly held beliefs about plant cultivation in the territory, researchers say. The findings, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, challenge some commonly held beliefs about plant cultivation in the territory and could have a significant impact for the Nuchatlaht First Nation's claim of Aboriginal title to more than 200 square kilometres of land on Nootka Island, off Vancouver Island's west coast.

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Three of hotelier David Marx’s projects are under scrutiny after an investigation uncovered that a retired architect who lent his license to the developer never saw the building plans.

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 At first, it was a place for fishermen to wash the flounder guts off, a simple building with priceless sunsets, on the shores of the Delaware Bay. The Sunset Beach Sportsmen’s Club has been around for nearly 80 years, and in all those decades, the membership has grown from a few fishermen from Philadelphia to 160. 

Shelby County officials waited weeks to file a lien against a home, leaving the new homeowner vulnerable to a hefty charge, documents showed. The Problem Solvers started investigating Sean Boyette’s case when he reached out with the peculiar circumstances.

For agents interested in growing their business by expanding into multiple states, we’re here to make the process simple and profitable. We offer you one point of contact to streamline your options and solutions.

Rasmus Petersen was a teenager when his family immigrated from Denmark and settled near Bend, Oregon. As an adult, Petersen began to collect rocks from the countryside and built miniature buildings on his property, for almost 20 years until his death in 1952. By then he had constructed a miniature Danish village, bridges, roads, water features, and sculptures including an American Flag and the Statue of Liberty with local stones.

After California in 2018 and Arizona in 2019, Michigan is the third state to give the all-clear to digital license plates. A California company called Reviver makes what it calls its RPlate and RPlate Pro for all three states, the firm saying 10 more states are in the process of approving the units

If you’re considering buying a home with a partner, or if either your property ownership or marital status could change in the future, it’s important to understand who legally owns what.

Officials have now identified a beaver as the cause of a June 7 outage which left many residents of northwestern B.C. without internet, landline and cellular service for more than eight hours. The beaver gnawed its way through an aspen tree which then fell on both BC Hydro lines and a Telus fibre-optic cable line strung along BC Hydro poles between Topley and Houston.

In 1997, the 46-year-old sued his local police department after being denied a job there because he scored too high on an intelligence test. More bizarre still, the courts sided with law enforcement