Andrew Azoulay of Douglas Elliman’s Azoulay Miles Team is suing Taylor Swift and her three business entities, FireFly Entertainment, 13 Management, LLC, and Euro Tribeca, for breach of contract in a real estate transaction.
Filed January 25 2018, this complaint revolves around a property Swift bought in October 2017 (reported here in November.)
Azoulay claims that Swift, through her management entities, gave him a “written exclusive promise” to represent her in the purchase of a property, however, when the deal closed on this specific property in October 2017, another broker unbeknownst to Azoulay handled the transaction on Swift’s behalf.
Azoulay had first showed Swift’s management team a property in December 2016. He then showed Swift’s team another property as a possibility for an off-market deal on January 17, 2017. (This property is immediately adjacent to the townhouse property Swift had owned and in which she resided at the time.)
Later that same day, January 17, 2017, FireFly Entertainment sent Azoulay an email indicating that Swift’s management team would work “solely” with him on the purchase of that property.
Azoulay then got a blueprint of the townhouse property and in February 2017, introduced Swift’s FireFly’s management team to the then owner of the property so they could together begin price negotiations.
All correspondence from FireFly to Azoulay regarding this property stopped in March 2017. Apparently, but not certainly in the information currently available, any correspondence and/or communication Azoulay initiated on his end to FireFly went unanswered. The next Azoulay learned seven months later was that Swift had purchased the property through her entity Euro Tribeca with another broker handling the transaction. The deal closed October 25, 2017.
In Azoulay’s claim of breach of contract, he is asking for a settlement in the amount of $1,080,000 as part of what he would have been paid as a 6% commission fee. Additionally, Azoulay is asking Swift and her three entities to pay judgment interests and costs involved with this law- suit.
According to a real estate law expert, Russ Cofano, an email such as Azoulay received from Swift’s management entities may “form a basis of a contract.” Also, according to Cofano, “…even oral conversations can form a contract.” Additional legalese indicates that when one person leads another person to rely “…to their detriment on representatives by that person, the court can impose contract-like obligations on that person…”
No court date has been set at this point in time so we’ll just have to wait to learn how things turn out for Swift and Azoulay regarding this transaction. On the other hand, we may never learn any transactional details as it’s likely this case may be quietly settled out of court.
