Court Opinion

ID: 9538651
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 07:38:58.017379+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:58:03.533580
License: Public Domain

WADE, Justice
(dissenting).
I dissent. In my opinion the oral contract comes within the provisions of Section 25-5-4(5), U.C.A. 1953. I am aware that under the common law a lease for a term of years, no matter for how long, was not “real estate” and that some states under statutes similar to ours, notably California and Washington, as pointed out in the prevailing opinion, have held that agreements employing brokers to obtain leases for a term of years are not within the statute because such leases are not “real estate.” However, I do not believe the California and Washington decisions are helpful in construing our statute because neither California nor Washington has a general construction statute which defines “real estate” as including possessory rights and claims.
Although the prevailing opinion’s conclusion that “possessory rights and claims” as used in Section 68-3-12(10), U.C.A. 1953, “in the technical sense refer to acquisition of rights by possession of a certain character or duration and usually such term concerns reference to interest in public lands” is not illogical. I cannot agree that the term “possessory rights and claims” under Section 68-3-12(10) is restricted to such an interpretation and does not include leases of real estate, but only such posses-sory rights which refer to some claim or ownership in property. Under the common law “tenements” included terms for years and certainly leases may be terms for years. So the prevailing opinion’s conclusions that because the section enumerates “land,” “tenements,” and “hereditaments” it is logical to assume the term “possessory rights and claims” refer to some ownership of real property, does not necessarily follow.
I believe there is nothing inconsistent with the manifest intent of the Legislature if we should determine that “real estate” includes leases of real property under the provisions of Section 25-5-4, nor is such an interpretation repugnant to the context of the statute. Although a literal reading-*334of this section might preclude the inclusion of a transaction such as we have here, that is the employment of the broker to procure a tenant to whom appellant could lease the property, rather than to employ the broker “to purchase or sell real estate for compensation”1 the transaction involved is really not different from the one in which the agent or the broker is employed to find a-seller or purchaser. The services are the same in both instances1. In one the ultimate result is a lease and in the other a conveyance of a lease already made to another person, but the person dealing with the real estate broker in' both cases procures a lease, and as far as the purposes of the statute are concerned the reasons for requiring, the contract of employment to be in writing are just as cogent in one case as in the other. There is no more reason for the Legislature to require that the services a real estate broker gives in procuring a sale of real estate must be in writing, as we have held in Case v. Ralph, 56 Utah 243, 188 P. 640, which ruling we have approved in Baugh v. Darley, 112 Utah 1, 184 P.2d 355, than there is to require that the same type of services given in procuring a lease should be in writing. The same reasons for enacting the statute to cure whatever evils the Legislature sought to cure in oral agreements to employ real estate brokers would apply in both instances. I, therefore, think that a contract to employ a real estate broker to procure a lease of real property comes within the provisions of Section 25-5-4(5) U.C.A. 1953.
MARTIN M. LARSON, D. J., concurs in the dissenting opinion of WADE, J.
WOLFE, C. J., being disqualified, did not participate in the hearing of this cause.