Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California
My parents have a commercial building that is (was) leased out to a small deli.
One of the partners does not work there anymore and does not help financially. They have been late several times and owe the state 80K in taxes. One person has someone who wants to invest but they are afraid that they will get the restaurant healthy and the guy will come back. He does not respond to being bought out.
4 Answers from Attorneys
What is the question? What is it you want to do as the landlord? This seems to be an isue the Deli owner needs to engage counsel to resolve. These types of partnership disputes are relatively common, but the landlord can't fix it.
I agree with Mr. Christian. I can't tell what your question is, and I cannot think of any legitimate role the landlord would play in the situation other than protecting their own interests in the event that ownership of the deli changes hands. Trying to interject themselves into the relationship between the partners and prospective future partners is only a recipe for getting the landlord into a mess.
Again, what's the question? Is the deli making its rent payments, or is there a delinquency issue? If the tenant isn't in default under its lease, the landlord has only limited rights to intervene or otherwise become involved. Also, you mention that one of the deli owners is a partner. This may mean the deli business is truly organized as a partnership -- but often, people speak of "partners" when they really should be saying co-owner of an LLC or corporation, or maybe just an officer or director. In any case, LawGuru lawyers would be much better equipped to answer if there were a question asked.
If you question is what should the prospective buyer do, the answer is to negotiate a well drafted contract containing all the terms necessary for his purpose. If he can't do that himself, then he needs to hire an attorney to do so for him.
That assumes that ALL the current owners will participate. Without that, there can be no 'deal'.
If serious about hiring counsel to help in this, feel free to contact me. I�ll be happy to help. I�ve been doing these cases for many years.