A landlord can enforce a clause in 1912 lease requiring that rent be paid in gold coin for a landmark building in Cleveland, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sent the case back to a U.S. District Court in Cleveland to determine the equivalent rent that S&R Playhouse Realty Co. would owe for the Halle building with the “gold clause” enforced. The lower court also must address any remaining defenses by S&R.

The building is owned by 216 Jamaica Avenue LLC, which filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit in 2006 against S&R demanding rent equivalent to the value of 35,000 1912 gold coins. S&R has paid $35,000 annually in U.S. currency since assuming the lease in 1982 and balked at paying what would be a much higher amount.

The office building in downtown Cleveland was leased originally by Salmon and Samuel Halle in 1912 from Realty Investment Corporation. It required $35,000 in rent to be paid in “gold coin of the United States.” In 1933, Congress withdrew gold from circulation and banned nearly all private ownership of it. It also passed a resolution declaring gold clauses against public policy and allowing obligations in contracts with existing gold clauses to be paid with paper currency.

Congress repealed the ban on private ownership of gold in 1975, later amending the 1933 law to provide that parties could include gold clauses in contracts formed after 1977.

I’ve been working with a group of investors who had partnered with the Seattle Housing Authority to build market-rate homes in the Rainier Vista, a housing development in South Seattle. It was a unique group of men brought together with a common purpose and goal and to build attractive and affordable housing, and the group named itself after George P. Riley, the first African-American landowner in the Washington and Oregon territories. Aubrey Cohen of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote about this interesting group of men in “Southeast Seattle group pays homage to African-American developer”.

Over the past year of working with this group, I’ve become acquainted with several of the principal investors and count them as my friends.

I was recently invited to a summer pool party at one one of the investors home, David Tyner and his wife, the artist Diane Christensen. We had a marvelous time and I was able to meet David’s beautiful and talented daughter, Whitney Tyner who’s the PR Coordinator for Zillow. Whitney has real estate in her veins, as her mother Debbie Jungquist also works in real estate for a local ReMax franchise.

As I had mentioned before, I’ve joined the Bloggers Council on Front Door and they sent me a Flip video camera to play with. I made a quick video of the pool party to share with the hosts and their friends. It’s simple, but the software that come with the Flip makes is a breeze to make fun music videos to share. Eventually, Front Door Blog will be posting our videos online.

Jim Reppond created a Buyer Without an Agent animation that re-enacts a possible conversation between a buyer and a listing agent.