Court Opinion

ID: 9651167
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-23 16:09:26.909172+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:19:36.067055
License: Public Domain

*631JONES, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
The one question raised on this appeal is whether the trial court erred in rejecting, as evidence of the market value of the condemned property, the plaintiff’s offer of a written instrument said to be an agreement for an antecedent sale of the subject property. I think the trial court’s ruling accomplished the right result, but, for a different reason than that assigned by the court below.
Regardless of whether the law governing the admissibility of the evidence is the law of Pennsylvania (the situs of the condemned property),1 as both the court and counsel conceived at trial, or whether, being a federal condemnation, the applicable rules are the rules supplied by federal law and that, under federal law,2 proof of a relevant prior sales price for the condemned property is admissible as evidence of its market value, I fail to see how the writing offered by the plaintiff can possibly be considered an agreement of sale,— certainly not a sale for cash or any other definite value.
Reference to the proffered writing (Plaintiff’s Exhibit 3) will disclose that, at most, it was no more than an option to the grantee to exploit the property by attempted sales thereof in lots according to a plan and schedule provided for in the agreement. While the agreement recited a consideration of $82,768.75, that sum represented, in reality, no more than the estimated aggregate to be derived by the owner from a sale by the optionee of all of the lots, if and when sold and paid for by the optionee at the unit price per lot fixed by the agreement. The agreement contained no promise or undertaking on the part of the optionee to pay the consideration or any part thereof except as it might sell lots from time to time and receive deeds therefor from the owner. No hand money was called for by the agreement nor was any paid by the optionee.
The undertaking of the optionee (a realty company) was that, within thirty days of the execution of the agreement, it or its nominee would pay to the owner $2,250, whereupon the owner would convey to the optionee or its nominee ten of the lots identified on the plan attached to the agreement as an exhibit. Within one hundred and ninety days of the execution of the agreement, the optionee or its nominee was to pay the owner an additional $2,250 and receive conveyances for ten more lots at the rate of $225 per lot which was the rate to be applied to the first eighty lots. The eighty-first lot was to be paid for at the price of $218.75; the next nineteen at $200 per lot; and the remainder of the lots (two hundred and forty-three) was to be paid for at the rate of $250 per lot. The agreement provided that the owner should be undér no duty to execute or deliver a conveyance for less than ten lots at any one time and, then only, upon receiving the respective allocated payments.
Moreover, the lots were blocked in series, the blocks being identified alphabetically, and the optionee was required to sell all of the lots in Block A before it could sell any lots in Block B or any succeeding block and, thereafter, likewise with respect to each alphabetically succeeding block. Of the total of three hundred and forty-three lots in the plan, the optionee needed sell only seventy-five in the first thirteen months to keep the agreement in force although all were to be sold within twenty-five months.
If the optionee failed to sell lots according to the time schedule of the agreement or abandoned the undertaking, there was no obligation upon it to pay the owner anything on account of the property except the respective amounts due for' the lots actually conveyed by the owner upon the optionee’s sale thereof. For the optionee’s failure to make the minimum payments for lots, in accordance with the schedule, the owner, at his option, could declare the agreement “insofar as not then executed” null and void and any interest of the optionee in the property not theretofore conveyed would thereupon cease and determine. No suit against the optionee for the contract price of the lots, if unsold, was maintainable and no damages for the optionee’s failure to sell all of the lots was either liquidated or stipulated. The agreement further expressly provided that it was not to be recorded.
The foregoing would seem to be sufficient to indicate that the agreement was far less than an agreement by the owner to sell the property in question for cash or to a responsible purchaser for a definite, certain and fixed consideration. The agreement *632would not have supported a hill for specific performance nor the equivalent, an action at law for a definite and fixed contract price for the land. In my opinion, the proffered agreement was not competent evidence, even under federal rules, of the market value of the property in question. If that is so, it logically follows that the trial court’s rejection of the agreement was not error.
Of course, the credibility and weight of evidence is for the jury but, assuming that the jury accepted the agreement as verity and accorded it the fullest weight to which it could possibly be entitled, there would still remain the question as to the sufficiency of the evidence for the purpose for which it is offered. That is a question of law which it is the duty of the court to decide. Nor may it be answered by saying that the jury may give the evidence such weight as it thinks it merits. The jury may do that only if, first of all, the evidence is competent.
What standards, it may be asked, could the trial judge have possibly given the jury in order that it might appropriately discount the aggregate of the prices of all the lots if the optionee should fail to sell them all or any substantial part of them? Or, what discount of the aggregate prices to the owner for all the. lots could the jury be told it might make if it found that the optionee, in order to obtain for less than a shoestring the privilege of trying to sell the land in lots, allocated to the owner a prospective share in the speculative values anticipated from a sale of the lots? Such a purchaser, free from any liability to himself, might well agree to a prospective ultimate realization by the owner from a sale of the -lots several times what the latter could possibly obtain for the property, as a whole, from an outright sale thereof to a responsible buyer.
If matter of such character as the proffered writing in this case is to be deemed competent evidence of the market value of the subject property, it is not difficult to imagine the type of evidence with which condemners of private property for forecasted public uses will be met when they come to judicial determinations of the fair, reasonable and just compensation to which the owners of property are rightly entitled. Such owners are not entitled, however, to vague, uncertain and speculative values and, particularly not, to values which depend upon a special exploitation of the property as yet unexecuted and wholly undetermined as even a likely reality.
I should overrule the appellant’s assignment of error and affirm the judgment of the District Court.

 See Act of August 1, 1888, 25 Stat. 357, 40 U.S.C.A. § 258.

 Cf. United States v. Miller, 317 U.S. 369, 374, 375, 63 S.Ct. 276, 87 L.Ed. 336, 147 A.L.R. 55.