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Emails valid as written evidence?

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in despair

Junior Member
What is the name of your state?
CA

Are email exchanges valid as written documentation/evidence in real estate law. Something should have been recorded on master documents as part of our purchase transaction, the responsible party failed to do so, said there was nothing she could do now, but admitted in email she knows it should have been recorded but wasn't.

Thank you.
 


divgradcurl

Senior Member
What is the name of your state?
CA

Are email exchanges valid as written documentation/evidence in real estate law. Something should have been recorded on master documents as part of our purchase transaction, the responsible party failed to do so, said there was nothing she could do now, but admitted in email she knows it should have been recorded but wasn't.

Thank you.
Maybe. It will depend in part on whether or not you can properly authenticate the emails. Plus, if you have a written and signed contract, it can be tough to get around the parol evidence rule. Emails are generally admissible in court -- it's just a matter of whether they can overcome the parol evidence (the written contract). Now, whether or not they will be sufficient to support your side of the story, that's a different question.
 

efflandt

Senior Member
E-mail is way to easy to forge (did you ever receive any spam/worm with fake From address), so you would likely need some way to verify it. If the contract was incomplete or incorrect, you should have had the changes noted and initialled on the contract before you signed it.
 

in despair

Junior Member
Thank you both for your replies. This has to do with assigned parking spaces -- when I purchased my condo, the sales agent agreed to swap the two spaces that came with my condo with two unowned/unoccupied/unspoken for spaces nearer to my unit for health reasons.

She was supposed to have noted it in the master records; there is no place I could have made any master recording-- I don't have access to those papers. Nor is there any place in the sales contract that specified parking spaces. She said she would handle the transfer and paperwork, etc., and I used the new spaces for over a year. The spaces are assigned on master records that will be handled by the HOA when the builder has sold all units (the HOA does not handle parking now). The spaces are not deeded, but they are permanently assigned and those assignments are transferred at resale, etc. So, I could only rely upon the sales agent to record it as she said she would and admitted that she forgot to.

Since I routinely passed the sales agent and other builder representatives in the parking garage and at my parking space over the time period, I never would have thought these were not mine to park in as everyone thought they were.

Then, (these are new condos), after almost a year-and-a-half of using these spaces, I am told I can't anymore because they belong to another unit that just closed escrow. When I asked and emailed the sales agent who sold me my condo as to what happened, she seemed surprised that this was happening, stated this surprise both verbally and in her email response to me, and also stated that something must be wrong -- that she knew those spaces had been transferred to me and that it was supposed to be recorded, but she didn't know why it had not been recorded -- again, stating this both verbally and in email to me.

So, I want to know if her acknowledgment that the spaces were supposed to have been transferred to me all along and the admission of the mistake in email is valid. Her company (the builder) says "well, nothing is in the master documents, so you are wrong and we won't do anything about it." I certainly couldn't have recorded it, and I used them just fine for a long time. And, she admits it.

And, yes, I posted about this in the "condo" section, but that had to do with can anything be done about getting my spaces back. In this post I just want to know if emails are valid evidence. I'm only going into the detail as your responses seemed to indicate you needed more information. Thank you.
 

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