Action to determine interests in land; Whether land contract requirements were satisfied; Quiet title; MCL 600.2932(1); Claim the trial court judge should have been disqualified; Bias; Applicable statute of limitations; MCL 600.2932

Holding that the defendants satisfied the requirements of the land contracts at issue, and rejecting plaintiffs’ other claims of error, the court affirmed the trial court’s order quieting title of the property in defendants. Plaintiffs first asserted “that defendants failed to pay the full amount due under the contract.” The parties’ written contract “required defendants to pay $10,000 for the property, but [defendant-]Dunlop testified that the parties orally agreed to modify the purchase price listed in the land contract, and that defendants paid the amended purchase price.” Plaintiffs contended defendants did not prove the “land contract was orally amended because the only evidence supporting the oral amendment was Dunlop’s testimony. But plaintiffs have not offered any caselaw or other authority to support their apparent assertion that a party cannot establish a fact by clear and convincing evidence on the basis of testimony alone, thereby abandoning the argument.” While they generally attacked Dunlop’s credibility, the court noted that it “gives deference to the trial court’s superior ability to judge the credibility of the witnesses that appear before it,” and it did not see any “reason to question the trial court’s credibility determinations in this case. Accepting Dunlop’s testimony as true, we are not convinced that the trial court made a mistake when it found that defendants proved, by clear and convincing evidence, that the parties orally agreed to modify the purchase price of the property, and that defendants paid that amended price.” Plaintiffs also asserted that “defendants failed to satisfy the terms of the parties’ contract” given witness testimony and other evidence that they “did not pay the 2015 property taxes, or the property taxes for any of the years after 2015. As the trial court rightly noted, however, Dunlop’s testimony established that defendants had fulfilled all of their obligations under the contract ‘by the fall of 2014,’ and it is not apparent why [their] failure to pay property taxes after that time—when equitable title had already passed to defendants—constituted a failure to perform an obligation under the land contract.” The court also found that plaintiffs waived their claim that the trial court judge was biased by failing to move for disqualification in the trial court, and defendants’ counterclaim was not time-barred where it was filed within 15 years after it accrued.