Intending to buy a lot to build a new home, sellers put their house up for sale and signed a contract with buyers. Then the lot the sellers hoped to buy was purchased by someone else and sellers tried to back out of their promise to sell their home to buyers. Although the sellers had intended the sale to be contingent on their getting title to the now-unavailable lot, that contingency was not included in the sales contract for their home because the realtor that drew up the agreement left it out and sellers apparently did not notice that when they signed the agreement. The buyers wanted to go through with the deal and refused to accept damages instead; they sought specific performance of the real estate sales contract, and the Wyoming Supreme Court gave it to them. Morningstar v. Robison, 527 P.3d 241 (Wyo. 2023).
The trial court relegated buyers to damages alone, denying specific performance but the Wyoming Supreme Court reversed on that question. The Court recognized that specific performance is an equitable remedy subject to the court’s discretion, there is a strong presumption for specific performance in all sales of real estate given the unique qualities of land and structures. The Court then found that the trial court erred by reading a contingency into the contract that was not there. Since the sellers did not bargain for the contingency, it was unfair to rewrite the agreement to enable them to get out of their commitment. Nor did the doctrine of mistake apply here since the sellers should have read the contract, and if they had, they would have seen that the contingency was not in the agreement.