Enforceability of a lease’s option to purchase clause; Weight placed on the use of the word “option”; Whether the parties intended the average of three appraisals to set the purchase price; Whether section 6.1(b) created an “escape point”; Whether plaintiff complied with the option clause; Whether the trial court exceeded its authority by adding additional terms to the contract

The court held that the trial court properly granted summary disposition for plaintiff on its claim (and defendant’s counterclaim) for breach of contract, granted plaintiff’s request for specific performance, and declined both parties’ request for declaratory judgment. The parties entered into a commercial lease in which plaintiff leased property from defendant. Defendant argued that the option to purchase clause was unenforceable because there was no fixed price clause. The court disagreed that the amount of consideration must be explicitly fixed in the contract. Rather, it agreed with the trial court that it was “sufficient if the contract has a fixed method of determining the sale price, which the option clause in this case did. Specifically, if the parties could not mutually agree upon a price and rejected each other’s appraisal, a third, neutral appraisal would be obtained and the sale price would be the average of the three.” This method clearly resulted in “a sale price in this case of $478,333,33. Simply put, it was sufficient that the contract provided for a method of fixing the sale price if the parties could not agree on one.” Defendant additionally argued that providing a method was “inadequate because there was not a meeting of the minds on the price for the property. But there was a meeting of the minds on how to establish the price,” which was sufficient. Defendant also contended that “the trial court improperly placed too much weight on the use of the word ‘option’ in section 6, particularly in the header.” Defendant further took “exception to the trial court’s pointing out that it was defendant who drafted the contract.” But the court agreed “with the trial court’s observation that if defendant did not intend to create an option, it would not have used that word several times in the contract.” Defendant complained that the trial court “gave the term ‘option’ its particular legal meaning as opposed to the understanding of the parties to the lease.” Yet defendant failed “to present any persuasive argument that the parties intended, in a legal document, to give the word anything other than its ‘particular legal meaning.’” Affirmed.