Taylor v. Holiday Isle, LLCTaylor v. Holiday Isle, LLC
ORDER
This matter comes before the Court on the Motion for Partial Summary Judgment (doc. 9) filed by defendant Holiday Isle, LLC. The Motion has been briefed and is ripe for disposition at this time. 1
I. Relevant Background.
The relevant underlying facts are straightforward and undisputed. Plaintiffs Celestine F. Taylor, Richard Murray, III, John and Lisa Murray, Arthur Fitzner, and John and Tracy Gardner all entered into agreements with defendant Holiday Isle, LLC to purchase enumerated condominium units of a development being constructed by Holiday Isle in Mobile County, Alabama. Uncontroverted record facts reflect that each plaintiff signed Pre-Con-struction Purchase and Escrow Agreements (the “Agreements”) with Holiday Isle between February 22, 2005 and March 3, 2005. 2 Each plaintiff paid a substantial earnest money deposit or arranged for delivery of a standby letter of credit to Holiday Isle, to be held by an escrow agent pending closing.
On June 5, 2007, plaintiffs’ counsel transmitted a letter to Holiday Isle on behalf of all plaintiffs in this case purporting to exercise their right to rescind the Agreements pursuant to the Interstate Land Sales Full Disclosure Act,
In their Complaint for Declaratory Judgment and Damages (doc. 1), plaintiffs delineate four causes of action, including a claim under the ILSFDA and pendent state-law claims for breach of contract, conversion and declaratory judgment. The sole cause of action at issue for purposes of the Motion for Partial Summary Judgment is Count One, in which plaintiffs
*1271
allege,
inter alia,
that they “are entitled to and have rescinded the Contracts pursuant to
II. Analysis.
The lone legal issue presented by Holiday Isle’s Rule 56 Motion concerns the meaning of and interplay between two distinct provisions of the ILSFDA, to-wit:
As the Court understands it, Holiday Isle’s position is that rescission is an available remedy under the ILSFDA only if a plaintiff invokes such remedy within two years after he or she signs the purchase agreement. Here, of course, it is uncontested that plaintiffs did not exercise their right of rescission within the two-year window, as they signed their agreements in February or March 2005, but did not notify Holiday Isle of the rescission until June
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2007, approximately 27 months later. According to defendant, then, plaintiffs’ failure to rescind their contracts within the two-year period provided by
Judging by the paucity of authority presented by the parties and the dearth of helpful case law brought to light by the undersigned’s own research, this legal question has not been definitively resolved by any published federal decision.
6
Nonetheless, after careful scrutiny of the statutory language, the limited interpretive guidance available, and the parties’ contentions, the Court concludes that defendant has the better argument. As an initial matter, the ILSFDA is quite clear that if a property report is required and is not provided to the purchaser in advance of execution of the purchase agreement, “such contract or agreement may be revoked at the option of the purchaser ... within two years from the date of such signing.”
Plaintiffs do not dispute this construction of
Is it possible, then, to harmonize the two-year period set forth in
Plaintiffs’ argument that the three-year period in
Although it is difficult to glean plaintiffs’ precise reasoning from their brief, their position is apparently that Holiday Isle’s failure to provide notice to plaintiffs of their right to rescind within two years excuses plaintiffs’ non-exercise of that rescission right within the
In the alternative, plaintiffs posit that enforcing the two-year rescission period when the developer failed to provide the notice required by
Additionally, the Court recognizes the possibility that a developer’s failure to provide the required notice of rescission rights might conceivably support a viable equitable tolling argument.
See generally Arce v. Garcia,
III. Conclusion.
For all of the foregoing reasons, defendant’s Motion for Partial Summary Judgment (doc. 9) is granted, and plaintiffs’ claims for rescission in Count One of the Complaint are dismissed. 13
Notes
. Also pending is plaintiffs' Motion for Court to Consider Additional Authority (doc. 14). In its discretion, the Court grants that Motion, and will consider
Sarfati v. Wood Holly Associates,
. The plaintiff-by-plaintiff breakdown is as follows: Richard Murray, III signed his Agreement on February 22, 2005; John and Lisa Murray signed their Agreement on February 27, 2005; Celestine F. Taylor signed her Agreement on February 28, 2005; John and Tracey Gardner signed their Agreement on March 3, 2005; and Arthur Fitzner signed his Agreement on March 3, 2005. (See doc. 9, at Exh. A-E.)
. More specifically, plaintiffs contend in Count One that their right to rescind stems from various ILSFDA violations by Holiday Isle, including its failure to register the condominium project, its failure to provide the required property report, its failure to state in the Agreements that plaintiffs had the right to rescind within two years if no property report were furnished before signing, and its inclusion of language in the Agreements designed to avoid application of the ILSFDA. Because the only issue presented in the Rule 56 Motion is whether plaintiffs timely invoked their statutory rescission rights, the Court will assume (without deciding) for purposes of this Order that Holiday Isle in fact violated the ILSFDA in the manner described in Count One.
. In its reply brief, defendant states that “[p]laintiffs do not dispute that the federal remedy of rescission or revocation pursuant to ILSA in
.“The ILSFDA was intended to curb abuses accompanying interstate land sales.”
Winter v. Hollingsworth Properties, Inc., 777
F.2d 1444, 1448 (11th Cir.1985). In light of its remedial purpose, "when faced with an ambiguity regarding the scope of an exemption [in the ILSFDA], the court must interpret the exemption narrowly, in order to further the statute’s purpose of consumer protection.”
Meridian Ventures, LLC v. One North Ocean, LLC,
. Indeed, the only authority cited by Holiday Isle for the proposition that a purchaser's two-year right of rescission under the ILSF-DA is not extended by a developer's failure to provide notice of the right to rescind in the purchase agreement itself is a 1992 unpublished federal district court opinion from Virginia, styled
Orsi v. Kirkwood, 1992
WL 511406 (E.D.Va. Apr.14, 1992). Although
Orsi
was affirmed on appeal, the appellate decision contains a footnote through which the Fourth Circuit expressly sidestepped the question of whether the district court was correct in deeming the plaintiffs’ rescission claim untimely notwithstanding the developer’s failure to provide notice of the right to rescind in the purchase agreement.
See Orsi v. Kirkwood,
. By its terms, the ILSFDA authorizes purchasers to file suit “to enforce any right under subsection (b), (c), (d), or (e) of
. This construction of the various ILSFDA temporal requirements finds support in both statutory language and several ancillary au *1274 thorities. For instance, legislative history accompanying the 1979 amendments to the ILSFDA explains that, "while retaining the two-year revocation period for failure to provide the property report, that right must be clearly indicated in the contract or agreement and a purchaser or lessee has a third year in which to sue to enforce the right." H.R.Rep. No. 96-154, at 36 (1979) (emphasis added). Likewise, a group of commentators interpreted these provisions as follows: "The actual revocation action must be instituted by the buyer within the time periods specified in each specific provision. That is ... the revocation for failure to deliver a property report in advance ... must be exercised within two years from the signing. The three-year limitation period is for actions to enforce the revocation right when the developer refuses to fulfill this obligation.” Paul Barron, et al., 1 Fed.Reg. Real Estate & Mortgage Lending § 3:97 (4th ed.2007) (footnote omitted). This view is echoed by another commentator, who wrote that "the limitations period is three years after the signing of the contract or lease ... if the action is for the enforcement of the following revocation rights created by the Act: (1) the general 7-day revocation right effective after a contract of sale or lease is signed; (2) the 2-year revocation right effective when a property report is not furnished in advance of signing a contract for sale or lease.” Howard J. Alperin & Roland F. Chase, 36A Mass. Prac., Consumer Law § 28:27 (2d ed.2007) (footnotes omitted).
. That said, if plaintiffs had sent their notice of rescission to Holiday Isle within two years after they signed the Agreements, then their rescission claims in this lawsuit would have been timely because they were brought within three years after the Agreements were signed. As noted
supra,
however, it is undisputed that plaintiffs waited more than two years after signing the Agreements before they attempted to exercise their
. Unquestionably, Congress knows how to extend rescission deadlines in consumer protection statutes when a seller fails to comply with disclosure requirements. For example, in the Truth in Lending Act,
. The only case that plaintiffs cite in support of the proposition that lack of notice of their right of rescission extends or eliminates the
. Indeed, they have failed to submit an equitable tolling argument at all. The only circumstance plaintiffs identify in support of their request for relief from the two-year rescission deadline is Holiday Isle’s failure to provide notice of that deadline in the Agreements. In isolation, the lack of notice by Holiday Isle does not constitute extraordinary circumstances to justify the extraordinary remedy of equitably tolling the two-year rescission period. Simply stated, this meager record cannot support a finding that plaintiffs were unable to rescind their Agreements within two years because of circumstances beyond their control and unavoidable even with diligence. Plaintiffs have not even propounded such an argument in their brief; therefore, application of the equitable tolling doctrine is unwarranted here.
. The parties’ arguments in their summary judgment briefs focused on the rescission issue, but the Motion for Partial Summary Judgment actually seeks dismissal of Count One in its entirety. All of the rescission claims in Count One fail under the foregoing analysis, inasmuch as they all were brought after the two-year period for rescission prescribed in