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Real Estate

Most real estate fights start as a document problem that surfaced late. Same firm handles both.

Quick summary: A property problem is one of the few business problems that charges you rent while you solve it. Taxes, insurance and debt service keep running. A deal that can’t close has an expiration date. A tenant who stopped paying is still in the space. Most of it started in a document signed years earlier — which is why the firm reading the documents and the firm litigating them should be the same one.

The meter runs the whole time

Whatever the dispute turns out to be, the property doesn’t pause for it. That’s what makes real estate different from most commercial fights: waiting has a price, and the price is charged monthly.

  • The carry doesn’t stop. Taxes, insurance, debt service and maintenance run whether or not anyone is arguing. A dispute that takes a year takes a year of carry with it.
  • A clouded title freezes everything attached to it. You can’t sell it, can’t refinance it, and can’t pledge it against anything else — which matters most when the property is the collateral behind your operating line.
  • Deals expire. Financing commitments have dates. Exchange windows have dates. A buyer’s patience isn’t infinite. A title issue that would have taken three weeks to clear before the contract can cost the whole transaction after it.
  • A tenant who stops paying is still in the space. You are housing them at your own cost, and every week of procedural misstep extends that.
  • For a lot of owners, the property is the balance sheet. It’s the collateral, the retirement, or the thing the succession plan quietly assumes will be there and unencumbered.

None of that is a reason to panic. It is a reason to find out quickly what you’re actually dealing with, because the cost of a real estate problem is mostly a function of how long it stays unresolved.

Almost all of it starts in a document

Real estate work is usually split between two kinds of lawyer. One does closings and never sees a courtroom. The other litigates and wasn’t there when the deal was papered.

That split is convenient for law firms and expensive for owners. Nearly every real estate dispute traces back to a document — a survey exception nobody questioned, a lease clause that allocated a cost differently than everyone assumed, a financing covenant that turned out to matter, an easement that was never researched.

  • Title exceptions are decisions, not formalities. Each one is a risk somebody agreed to accept, usually without discussing it.
  • Lease terms outlive the negotiation. Maintenance, CAM, assignment and default provisions decide years of the relationship long after everyone who negotiated them has moved on.
  • Financing terms constrain the asset. What you can do with the property later is set by documents signed at closing.
  • Entity structure decides exposure. Who holds title, and how, matters enormously the moment something goes wrong.
  • Development carries its own chain. Land use, permitting and construction contracts each create obligations that outlast the project.

Counsel who reads a document with the dispute in mind writes a different document. Counsel who litigates knowing what the parties were actually trying to do argues a different case.

What we handle

Transactions and closings

  • Acquisitions, dispositions and property transactions
  • Retail and commercial closings
  • Title matters, title review and curative work
  • Real estate finance and loan documentation
  • Commercial leasing and property management operations

The firm acts as authorized agent for multiple title insurers, so title work, curative issues and closings are handled in-house rather than coordinated across vendors. When a closing is at risk, that shortens the chain of people who have to agree before anything can move.

Development and ownership

  • Real estate development, construction and redevelopment
  • Community association law
  • Loan workouts, restructuring and asset preservation

Disputes

  • Property rights and real estate litigation
  • Title insurance claims
  • Landlord and tenant disputes, commercial and residential
  • Foreclosure and related litigation
  • Bankruptcy-related real estate issues

Why Kass Shuler

The firm is AV® rated and has practiced real estate in Tampa for over four decades, on both the transactional and the litigation side, for owners, investors, lenders and developers.

The practical value of that combination shows up when a matter changes shape. A title problem becomes a lawsuit. A borrower stops paying. A tenant won’t leave. A defaulting owner files for bankruptcy. None of those require finding a new firm and explaining the property from the beginning — foreclosure, creditors’ rights in bankruptcy and construction all sit down the hall from this practice.

And if the honest read is that the cost of fighting exceeds what the outcome is worth, you’ll hear that. On property, where the carry runs regardless, that answer is sometimes worth more than a winnable claim.

Common questions

Our closing is days away and a title issue just surfaced.

Call before you agree to anything. Some exceptions can be cleared quickly, some can be insured over, and some are genuine defects you should not be accepting no matter how close the date is. The pressure of a scheduled closing is exactly what makes owners accept risks they’d never take with a week’s breathing room. Being the title agent as well as the lawyer usually means we can tell you which of the three you have within a day.

Do we need a lawyer for a Florida closing?

Florida doesn’t require one, and plenty of residential closings happen without. On commercial property, unusual title, seller financing, entity ownership or anything with a survey issue, the value is in someone reading the exceptions and telling you which ones you shouldn’t accept.

Title insurance says we’re covered. Why would we need counsel on a claim?

Because coverage is defined by the policy and its exceptions, and the disputes are about scope. Whether a defect falls inside the policy, and what the insurer owes if it does, is exactly where a claim gets contested.

Our commercial tenant has stopped paying.

Commercial eviction in Florida moves faster than residential, but the process is unforgiving about notice and procedure — and a misstep restarts a clock you’re paying for. What the lease says about default, cure periods and acceleration usually decides how quickly this ends, so that’s where to start.

A borrower is in default on a loan we hold.

You have a range of options between doing nothing and foreclosing — workout, forbearance, restructuring, deed in lieu. Which one makes sense depends on the collateral value, the borrower’s position and your own timeline. It’s worth analyzing before defaulting to foreclosure, because foreclosure is the slowest and most expensive path on the list.

How long does a property dispute take?

It depends on the type. A curative title matter can resolve in weeks. A contested boundary, quiet title or partition action runs considerably longer. What matters more than the average is knowing early which one you have, because that determines whether you keep carrying the property through it or take a different exit.

Do you work outside Tampa Bay?

Yes. The firm handles real estate matters statewide across Florida.

Bottom line: what a real estate problem costs is mostly decided by how long it stays open, and most of them started in a document nobody read closely enough. Handling the document and the dispute in one place is how you stop paying twice to learn the same lesson. Send us what you have and you’ll get a straight read on how long this is likely to take.

Talk to us · (813) 229-0900 · 1604 N. Marion St., Tampa, FL 33602 · Serving owners, investors, lenders and developers statewide across Florida

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