Evans Marble Co. v. Abrams

Constable, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. This appeal is from a decree sustaining exceptions filed to* the ratification of a trustee’s report of sale and setting aside the said sale. George W. Abrams and Alexander J. Abrams, Jr., gave to the appellant in 1894 a mortgage on leasehold properties in the City of Baltimore to secure the payment of $998.37. Default having been made in the payment, of the mortgage debt, the appellant filed his petition to foreclose said mortgage.

The usual decree to* sell the property was passed, and a trustee appointed for that purpose. The* appellant also filed in said proceedings a claim under a second mortgage from the same parties to* it. The trustee offered the property described in the mortgage at public sale, on the premises, and sold the same, in its entirety, to Patrick J. Cushen for the sum of $1,125.00. The surviving mortgagor filed exceptions to the ratification of the sale upon several grounds, all of which, except two, have been abandoned and need not be adverted to.

The two reasons relied upon by the appellee for an affirmance of the decree passed are, first, that the property was sold for a greatly inadequate price; second, because of the injudicious, improper and insufficient advertising of said sale. ²⁰⁶ The law of this State is firmly settled in a long line of decisions, that in sales made by trustees under decrees in equity mere inadequacy of price standing by itself is not sufficient to invalidate a sale, unless it be so gross and inordinate as to indicate want of reasonable judgment and discretion, or misconduct or fraud in the trustees, or some mistake or unfairness for which the purchaser is responsible. Every intendment will be made to support such sales, but where it is seen an injustice will be done, through the ratification of a sale, to a person not in default, by reason of the carelessness or omission of its own officer, the Court will interfere to prevent it. Sales will not be set aside for causes that the parties in interest might, with a reasonable degree of diligence, have obviated. Johnson v. Dorsey, 7 Gill, 269 ; Kauffman v. Walker, 9 Md. 229 ; Bank v. Lanahan, 45 Md. 397 ; Loeber v. Eckes, 55 Md. 1 ; Stewart v. Devries, 81 Md. 528 ; Thomas v. Fewster, 95 Md. 446 .

The mortgage covered two contiguous leasehold tracts of' ground, containing approximately sixty-five hundred square feet and seventy-two hundred square feet, respectively; and, from the testimony taken, it appears that witnesses for each side admitted that the tracts would sell to better advantage as a whole than if offered separately, because of the extremely irregular shape of one of the tracts; so we are not concerned with the question as to the manner of offering the property for sale. The witnesses produced by both sides were mainly of the real estate expert class, and, from a close reading of their testimony, we are unable to hold that the price realized was a grossly inadequate one, though to some extent it was inadequate. The prices placed by them upon both tracts as a whole, ranged from $1,400.00 to $5,000.00. The witness Wright was the one who put the highest valuation on the property and used this language in doing so: “I would think $4,500.00 or $5,000.00 would be a right moderate estimate of these two leasehold properties.

I think they would be sold ²⁰⁷ or offered for sale at a great deal less price than that.” It was also in evidence that the properties were assessed for the year 1917, in