Thursday, June 25, 2026
Page 3
Court of Appeal:
Realtor Has No Duty to Warn Buyer of Local Ordinances
Justices Reject Purchasers’ Contention That Sellers’ Agents Were Obliged to Tell Them of Parking Restrictions
By a MetNews Staff Writer
Realtors representing the sellers of a home in San Marino did not breach a duty to the buyers to reveal that city ordinances barred parking on the street between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. and forbade leaving a vehicle in the driveway for 48 straight hours, Div. Four of this district’s Court of Appeal has held.
Presiding Justice Helen Zukin authored the unpublished opinion affirming a judgment of dismissal by Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Jared D. Moses which followed his sustaining of a demurrer without leave to amend.
Moses reasoned:
“Given that the parking restrictions are matters of public record, which Plaintiff could have learned about through minimal effort, the Court remains unpersuaded by Plaintiff’s arguments.”
The purchasers, Daniel J. Carroll and Jana D. Law, maintain that real estate agent Lloyd Ross and the company he works for, Douglas Elliman, are liable to them based their selling the house for $350,000 less than the $3.7 million they paid for it, asserting that its value was diminished in light of the parking restrictions. Those restrictions were listed in an “information guide” published by the city. San Marino has devised a “Required Notification Form” on which seller or their agents are expected to certify receipt by buyers of the diminished guide.
A copy of the guide was not provided to the plaintiffs. They learned of the undisclosed ordinances after escrow closed and they began receiving parking tickets.
Appellants’ Contention
Carroll and Law argued on appeal, in a brief drafted by Charles Matthew Clark of the Irvine firm of Jackson Tidus:
“The Trial Court appears to have essentially been legislating from the bench as the ruling struck down City of San Marino’[s]…mandated disclosure requirements for the benefit of new homeowners. The effect of the Trial Court’s ruling is to moot or negate the City’s regulation that sellers and brokers have to provide the informational package to new homeowners.”
The defendants/respondents maintained, in a brief prepared by Ari L. Markow and Mark R. Wilson of the downtown Los Angeles office of Manning & Kass, Ellrod, Ramirez, Trester:
“Neither the real estate disclosure statutes nor a listing agent’s common law duties to a prospective buyer requires the agent to inform the buyer of facts which are within the buyer’s diligent observation. Publicly accessible information is deemed to be within a buyer’s diligent observation, and state and local laws are publicly accessible information.”
The respondents maintained that their duty to the buyer is limited by Civil Code §2079 which requires them “to conduct a reasonably competent and diligent visual inspection of the property offered for sale and to disclose to that prospective buyer all facts materially affecting the value or desirability of the property that an investigation would reveal.” Carroll and Law countered in their reply brief:
“A seller’s agent owes the buyer a common-law duty to disclose known material facts not within the buyer’s diligent attention and observation….This duty exists independently of the statutory visual-inspection duty in Civil Code section 2079….”
Zukin’s Opinion
Siding with the respondents, Zukin wrote:
“Here, we conclude that the sellers’ agents were not required to research the city’s ordinances regarding parking restrictions. While the sellers’ agents had a duty to disclose material facts ‘an investigation would reveal,’ there were no allegations in the operative complaint that visual inspections of the property alone revealed or would have revealed these parking restrictions without further research into the city’s ordinances.”
She said that “quite the opposite”; the operative pleading notes that there were “no street signs by the Property at issue that contained the language” of the pertinent ordinances.
Zukin continued:
“Thus, no reasonably competent and diligent visual investigation of the subject property would have revealed the city’s parking restrictions….The buyers failed to supply any legal support for their assertion that the Notification Form, which appears to be a form generated by the city, imposes a legally binding duty on a seller’s agent to provide the Information Guide. Accordingly, the buyers have failed to establish that the sellers’ agents owed them a duty of disclosure.”
The case is Carroll v. Ross, B346044.
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