New Jersey Attorney Law Review Blog

When a construction supplier sells materials on credit to a contractor with multiple open accounts, receives only partial payments without instructions from the contractor as to whose jobs/accounts the payments should be applied to, and later seeks to enforce a construction lien claim against a single property owner for the unpaid balance, the supplier must make inquiry as to the source of the funds obtained by the contractor to pay the supplier.   The suppliers duty in this regard extends to circumstances where a reasonable supplier should suspect the contractor has not used an owner's funds to pay for materials supplied for that owner.  The purpose in requiring a supplier to ascertain the source of its customer's funds is to ensure that the supplier has properly allocated its customer's payments to the correct jobs/accounts.   A supplier that fails to fulfill this duty sacrifices its rights under the Construction Lien Law, a NJ appeals court concluded in  L&W

  There are significant legal distinctions between owning property as tenants by the entirety versus owning property as tenants in common.  Understanding these legal distinctions is important when it comes to purchasing  residential real estate with friends, business partners, or relatives. A joint tenancy is a form of property ownership where the co-owners own the property equally.  If one joint tenant dies, the surviving joint tenant automatically inherits the entire property.   By contrast, a tenancy in common is a form of co-ownership of property that does not include a right of survivorship.   In a tenancy in common, each co-owner's portion can be passed to beneficiaries named in a will, which may or may not be someone who the surviving co-tenant ever envisioned owning the property with or living with.  In New Jersey, two people, other than married couples, are presumed to own property as tenants in common unless they've otherwise specified in the deed.   

  In a recent decision that merits the attention of borrowers and lenders in commercial real estate foreclosures, the New Jersey Appellate Division held that a lender's acceptance of numerous late payments did not constitute a modification to the mortgage or result in curing the borrower's mortgage default.  Bank of America v. Princeton Park Associates, L.L.C. , Docket No. A-0927-11T3 (App Div., November 8, 2012).   Consequently, the Appellate Division affirmed the trial court's granting of summary judgment in favor of the lender. The facts of the case are rather straightforward.  Princeton Park Associates involved a commercial real estate loan transaction. The lender’s loan documents contained the standard default and acceleration provisions. Also, the promissory note included the following provisions: (i) no failure by the lender to accelerate the debt pursuant to the default provisions would constitute a waiver of the lender’s rights to insist on s