Mutual Repairs Agreement – part I | Beit Din Eretz Hemda - Gazit | Beit Midrash

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Case: The plaintiff (=pl) owns and operates an auto-repair shop. Pl and the defendant (=def) agreed (everything was oral) to an arrangement whereby def would use pl’s facilities and tools to fix cars for his customers and rent storage area from pl. Def was to pay pl 15% of this income to pl. Due to technical pressures, pl received all of def’s fees and paid def a monthly "salary," representative of def’s earnings. [We will deal with various points of dispute in installments.] It had been agreed that a wall would be put up in the property to hermetically seal the area where def stored his property. For various reasons, it took quite a while for the wall to be erected, and therefore def claims that he is exempt from paying rent for the storage area.

Ruling: Rent for storage area due to late placement of a wall – While all agree there was agreement to erect a wall, the sides disagree whether it was a condition for payment of rent. It is also unclear if the purpose was to give def privacy or to protect valuable items that def might want to put there. Beit din rules that def must pay rent. An oral agreement to rent an area can be made binding based on chazaka, i.e., the renter’s use of the area for his purposes (see Machaneh Ephrayim, Sechirut 1; Netivot Mishpat 192:6). This was done, making the agreement binding. For a condition to nullify the transaction if it is unmet, the condition must be mentioned explicitly at the time of the kinyan (Shulchan Aruch, Choshen Mishpat 207:4). In a case like this, where the kinyan was definite and the existence of a condition is questionable, the definite existence of a kinyan gives the one who wants to uphold it against nullification the upper hand.

Def claims that the storage area he received is flawed due to the lack of the wall. Pl claims that the rent was for the space, whereas the promise of the wall was an additional agreement that does not take away from the first one. According to the majority of dayanim, the above logic applies – the agreement is definite, the condition is unclear, and therefore def should pay in full. According to the minority opinion, since the question is not whether to uphold the agreement, but how much def should pay, after the fact, the amount should be adjusted to reflect the lower value of the area as a storage room without a wall (for many months).

Payment for eventual building of a wall – Def had promised to pay 4,000 NIS for the building of the above wall but refuses to pay it, because it was built at such a great delay that it is irrelevant and because it was not built in a hermetic enough manner. Beit din rejects both claims. There was no time set for the building of the wall, and, in fact, def was originally supposed to be in charge of arranging it. When it was built, def was still using pl’s property, and def did not set a deadline for pl, after which point, he would not pay for it. There is no indication that def had raised a specific description of the wall, and a retroactive complaint that came up first only in the summation of claims before beit din’s writing the ruling is not to be accepted in such a matter.