After you have identified your desired real estate, our lawyer can assist you with the drafting of a purchase agreement that includes the opportunity to conduct due diligence inspections of the property and matters affecting the property. Once your purchase agreement is executed, we can assist you with locating experts to help you with physical inspections of the property (including on-site inspections, surveys and environmental studies) and financial inspections if necessary related to the operation of the property. Moreover, your lawyers can be critical to a review of your title commitments and related matters to ensure that you are obtaining a marketable interest in the property, as well as investigating liens, encroachments, restrictions and zoning matters to ensure that you can develop or operate the property to achieve your desired outcome.

Through a purchase of business assets or the stock or membership interest in a company, a buyer can normally obtain the necessary rights to take over the operation of a business as a new owner. With an asset sale, the entity that operated the business before closing continues to be owned by the same sellers it had prior, but continues without any or limited assets, and the assets themselves get sold to a new entity owned and controlled by the buyer. With a stock or membership interest sale, the person owning all the stock or membership interest in a company that operates a business sells that stock or membership interest to the buyers, and the buyers continue to operate that entity as new shareholders or members. There are both risks and benefits to each type of sale. But if the assets include real estate, the buyer should certainly consider obtaining title insurance to cover the risks of adverse interests in the real estate. Whether you are receiving a deed to the real estate in an asset sale, or the membership interest in the company that owns real estate, local title companies are able to issue policies of insurance to cover the risk of adverse interest.

If you are buying a piece of real estate – whether it be commercial or residential – on “contract for deed”, “installment sales contract”, or “rent to own”, you are ordinarily not receiving legal title to the property at that time. In those situations, the seller retains legal title to the property until all payments are made, and at that time would
execute some form of deed on the property to you as the buyer. In those instances, we can assist you with creating agreements to escrow the deed and providing for protections for the equity you are acquiring in the property. In an outright sale, the seller conveys the property to you by deed at closing. In those instances, the risk of obtaining title is
reduced. If a seller wants to help finance the property and you want to obtain legal title at closing, we can help create a promissory note and a mortgage to secure the repayment of the loan.