All Forum Posts by: Gayle Thompson

I am the beneficiary of my brother's revocable living trust (Oregon). He died 18 months ago. Until a month ago, his land was titled to the trustee of his Revocable Living Trust, but that land is now titled to me. My brother signed a ground lease with a cell tower company for a portion of that land. The lease was never sold and there is no assignment of the lease to me. The lease states that rent payments be made to a third party, a corporation. My brother owned one-third of the shares in that corporation.

When my brother titled the land to the trustee, did the lease automatically become the property of the trust? Or did the lease need to be specifically assigned to the trustee while my brother was still alive? Do I now own the lease because I own the land?  Does the corporation own the lease because the agreement was to make the payments out to the corporation? What about the money that was paid to the corporation during the time the land was the property of the trust? Does the corporation get to keep the rent money because the tower company was never notified to make payments to the trust (if indeed the lease was held by the trust)? I posed these questions to different lawyers and have received different answers. I am beyond frustrated and don't know where to turn for answers.

I have a month-to-month commercial tenant in Oregon. After 8 years of no rent increases, I verbally requested an increase and he has been paying it since January. I never notified him in writing. We agreed that he needed a commercial lease with a longer term. I gave him a draft to review, but told him I would never enter into an agreement with him until he cleared up some non-rent monies that he owed me. He disagreed with his debt and we met to go over it. He also wanted to discuss some changes to the drafted contract. I agreed with some of his changes, but not all of them, and let him know that I still had no intention of moving forward with the contract until he paid what he owed. We left the meeting at an impasse on his debt and the contract.

A couple of months later, after wildly altering the contract, he signed it, dropped it off at the office, then informed me that I had agreed to it. I had not received the payment I required, nor had I even looked at the altered contract. And I never signed it.

1. He claims that my acceptance of his payments implies that I agreed to his contract. Is there any truth to this?

2. I think that his payments imply that he agreed to the increase. Is this correct?

3. Are there any legal consequences created by my not notifying him in writing of the increase?

4. He claims he could take us to court for Detrimental Reliance and Promissory Estoppel. Is there any way either of these concepts could apply to this situation?