Buyers want to leave responsibility for historic
waste disposal with sellers, or sellers
want to have buyers expressly assume that
responsibility.
The parties want their agreement to be allencompassing
with respect to the apportionment
of environmental liabilities
between them and extinguish common
law or statutory causes of actions that might
otherwise exist.
They want to define the extent of the
cleanup obligations of the party who has
assumed those obligations and assure those
obligations remain only with that party.
They want to define how long their contractual
remedies remain viable.
While contract language divvying up environmental
liability has generally improved, there are five
common mistakes that are still frequently seen.
This article was originally published in Commercial Investment Real Estate, the magazine of the CCIM Insititute.