We acted for the ownership group and sellers of a valuable piece of development land in Kelowna. Our clients agreed to sell the land to a Vancouver-based developer, who agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars for the land.
Just prior to the closing date, the buyer attempted to back out of the transaction, alleging that our clients had failed to act reasonably in securing the land use designation that would have been most favourable for the development. The developer threatened to sue our clients for many tens of millions of dollars—more even than the purchase price of the land itself. The stakes on both sides were extremely high.
In a series of tense and lengthy negotiations, we skillfully resolved the dispute by forcing the developer to close on the purchase. In doing so, we granted only minimal post-closing concessions, including offering a vendor take-back mortgage to the developer for a modest component of the purchase price, in order to ease the developer’s financing burden and thereby make the closing possible. In this way, we achieved our clients’ objective while also identifying, and resolving, a key stumbling block for the opposing party. Again, we preserved millions of dollars in value for our clients and successfully defended against a very large lawsuit, all without any need for recourse to the court.