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Since 1986, when Proposition 58 passed, certain transfers of real property between parents and their children have been excluded from reassessment for purposes of determining property taxes. Proposition 58 provided an exclusion from reassessment for (1) a principal residence of the transferring parent, and (2) the first $1 million of full cash value of all “other real property” transferred from a parent to a child. Proposition 193, passed in 1996, added a similar reassessment exclusion for transfers between grandparents and their grandchildren (when the grandchildren’s parents are deceased).

In December 2020, President Trump signed into law the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 (the CAA).

In total, the CAA provides $900 billion in COVID relief, including $284 billion for additional Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans for new borrowers and “second draw” loans for existing borrowers.

The eligibility requirements for a “second draw” PPP loan (PPP2 Loan) are as follows:

1) The borrower must spend the full amount of the first PPP loan before receiving the PPP2 Loan.

This past Monday, December 21, a $900 billion pandemic relief bill came out of the U.S. House and Senate. It is called the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021. If President Trump signs it, it will become law. Weighing in at 5,593 pages in length, it addresses many areas, including vaccines, education, childcare, jobless benefits, energy, and national security.

Part of the bill is the COVID-Related Tax Relief Act of 2020 (COVIDTRA).

By Louis Gonzalez, Jr., Josh Escovedo, and Mark Ellinghouse

California Real Property Journal

This article was first published in Volume 38, No. 4, 2020 of the California Real Property Journal, reprinted by permission.

The COVID-19 pandemic has strongly affected contractual relationships in the real estate industry. This article discusses the most important legal defenses for practitioners to be aware of,

Many businesses affected by COVID-19 and the related shelter-in-place orders are turning to their business interruption insurance policies in hope of finding relief. In general terms, a business interruption insurance policy replaces some or all of a business’s income when the business is forced to curtail or cease its operations as the result of a disaster. In the vast majority of cases, insurance companies have turned away COVID-related business interruption claims, claiming that these policies do not provide coverage for COVID-related claims.

While the effects of the COVID-19 health crisis have impacted daily life for months, the legal implications of this pandemic are just starting to develop. Unforeseen conditions often wreak havoc on existing contractual relationships, which are typically based on factual assumptions that, due to unexpected conditions like COVID-19, may no longer be appropriate. Many parties work through these circumstances through negotiation, reconciling their previous expectations and current conditions with their desired outcome, but these negotiations aren’t always successful.

Unlike the Great Recession in 2008, landlords and tenants responding to the negative economic impact of the COVID-19 health crisis appear to be focusing more on rent relief as opposed to strict interpretation and enforcement.  Both sides seem to acknowledge that this downturn is driven by external, uncontrollable influences, and therefore each side should cooperate to weather the storm. It is the approach we most strongly encourage our clients to take, as it strengthens the relationship between landlord and tenant and avoids unnecessary expenditures on costly lease enforcement.

Landlords and property managers have massive amounts of guidance materials available to them as they prepare to reopen their properties. These materials detail many different things a property owner can do.  In the face of this, the question being asked by many owners is: what are they actually required to do, what is their legal duty?  Unfortunately, the answer is both fact- and circumstance-specific, taking into account the property and its users, as well as federal,

On June 4, 2020, the Internal Revenue Service published Notice 2020-39 (Notice) which provides relief to qualified opportunity funds (QOFs) and their investors in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Here is a summary, and more details follow below:

• Investors who otherwise would be required to reinvest capital gains into a QOF any time this year on or after April 1 now have until December 31, 2020 to reinvest such gains.

As the first of the rent moratoriums are expiring, landlords throughout California are eager to file unlawful detainer actions to obtain possession of their properties from tenants who have failed to pay rent or comply with repayment obligations. While it is natural for landlords to want to immediately initiate unlawful-detainer proceedings, they should proceed with caution. Landlords who issued 3-day or 30-day notices to their tenants for failure to pay rent during the moratorium period would be wise not to rely on those notices as the basis of an unlawful detainer action.