Beasley v. Caplan

Henderson, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. A proceeding to foreclose a mortgage dated March 11, 1949 was duly instituted in the Circuit Court No. 2 of Baltimore City. After advertising a sale in three publications and mailing two hundred cuts to a list of real estate dealers, two of the three parcels of unimproved land included in the mortgage were sold at public auction to York Realty Company for $5,100. The mortgagor filed exceptions to the sale which were overruled after hearing.

The appeal is from the order overruling the exceptions and ratifying the sale. The appellant contends (1) that the property should have been advertised and offered for sale as individual lots, (2) that the price obtained was grossly inadequate, and (3) that the Trustee should have applied funds in his hands, belonging to the appellant, to the outstanding indebtedness on the ¹⁰² mortgage “thereby eliminating the necessity of the mortgage herein being in default”. We find no merit in these contentions. There was testimony by the trustee and by the auctioneer that although the property, fronting 250 feet on Greenspring Avenue and 100 feet on Ruscombe Lane, had been laid out in 1920 into fourteen lots according to a recorded plat, it was irregular in its topography, wooded and heavily overgrown, and “actually one lot”.

The mortgagor had planned to utilize it as a site for an apartment house. It was not suitable for sale to individual purchasers, but only for sale to a developer; to properly grade and clear the property would cost about $5,000. The property was also threatened with a loss of some twenty feet of frontage by a proposed widening of 'Greenspring Avenue. For reasons stated, the sale was held at the Real Estate Board rather than on the property.

The cases of Waters v. Prettyman, 165 Md. 70 , 166 A. 431 and Long v. Worden, 148 Md. 115 , 128 A. 745 , are clearly distinguishable. On the facts, the case resembles Hunter v. Highland Land Company, 123 Md. 644 , 91 A. 697 . We think the chancellor was correct in finding that the price was not so inadequate as to warrant the setting aside of the sale. As was said in Preske v. Carroll, 178 Md. 543, 550 , 16 A. 2d 291 , 294: “mere inadequacy of price, standing by itself, is not sufficient to invalidate a sale,