Court Opinion

ID: 9834142
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-01 23:19:48.256607+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:44:11.976456
License: Public Domain

On Motion for Rehearing.
 The statutory lien was not waived by the failure of appellant to record its personal lien on the Garretson property, and the only question in the case is as to the facts being such as to put appellee upon inquiry, that would have resulted in the ascertainment of the existence of the lien.
Appellee not only devotes a large part of his original motion for rehearing to the assumed failure upon the part of this court to consider the agreement of the parties that, appellee had no actual or constructive notice of the lien on the property “unless as a matter of law he is charged with notice thereof by reason of the records then on file in the office of the city clerk of the city of San Antonio, as hereinafter mentioned, or unless, as a matter of law, he is charged with such knowledge by reason of any work which may have been done by plaintiff, or the contractor under whom plaintiff claims in the carrying out of the improvements on which plaintiff’s claim is based.” That agreement was used by this court in connection with the evidence in the ease showing knowledge upon the part of appellee of improvements being made upon the street at the time he inspected the property with a view to purchasing it. While not as lucidly and aptly expressed as it might have been, this court considered that the agreement in connection with the city records presented the question of whether the facts were sufficient to put appellee upon inquiry as to liens on the property.
The opinion of this court was not based “wholly upon the theory” that appellee did not attempt to show that he did not know that the street was being paved when he bought the property. The facts show that appellee knew the. pavement as being constructed in front of the property when he bought, and that fact is in effect admitted in the agreement which is made the burden of the motion for rehearing. There would have been no basis for the agreement about the work on the street being enough to excite inquiry if there had not been evidence that ap-pellee knew the work was in progress when he bought.
We thoroughly concur with the opinions cited in the “supplemental motion for rehearing,” and adopt as peculiarly appropriate to the facts of this case the language used by a district court in a charge which was approved in the opinion rendered by Judge Stayton in the case of Sickles v. White, 66 Tex. 178, 17 S. W. 543, as follows:
“Notice may be actual or constructive. Constructive notice is a conclusive presumption, or presumption of law, which arises from certain facts proven to pxist, as for instance, the proper and legal registration of a deed in the county where the land lies. Actual notice exists when knowledge is actually brought home to the party to be affected by it, or where he might, by the use of reasonable diligence, have informed himself of the existence of certain facts. The question of notice is a question of fact to be determined by the jury from all the facts and circumstances given in evidence before them on this subject. You are charged that any information which was sufficient to have put a prudent man upon inquiry will be regarded as notice, if it was of such a character that he might have ascertained the facts by the use of proper diligence.”
Appellee did not deny the facts in this ease, but in effect admitted by agreeing that a ques*935tion of law was presented for application to the facts that he had knowledge of the construction of the pavement.
Under the uneontradieted facts, we hold as a matter of law that the facts were sufficient to put appellee upon inquiry, which, if he had followed up as any reasonably prudent man should have done, he would have ascertained that there was a lien upon the land before he bought it.
The motion for rehearing is overruled.