Angus Hunt Ranch, Inc. v. REB, Inc., 577 P.2d 645 (Wyo. 1978)
Legal information, not legal advice. Verify against the cited opinion.
- Citation: 577 P.2d 645 (Wyo. 1978)
- Court / Year: Supreme Court of Wyoming, 1978
- Topic tags: forfeiture, equitable_interest
- Facts: Buyers under a contract of sale of land defaulted and, resisting forfeiture, argued (1) the contract should be construed as an equitable mortgage (which would entitle them to foreclosure and redemption rather than forfeiture) and (2) the seller had waived the right to declare forfeiture.
- Holding: The Court rejected the equitable-mortgage characterization. To convert an installment land contract into an equitable mortgage, the buyer must show the parties intended the transaction to operate as a security device, construed from the written agreement and surrounding circumstances; the burden is on the party asserting the mortgage.
- Reasoning: Quoting E. George Rudolph, The Wyoming Law of Real Mortgages 147 (1969), the Court observed there is “very little possibility that a court will construe such a contract as a mortgage, assuming that it does not depart too far from the usual terms and provisions.” Where the instrument is a genuine installment land contract, legal/absolute title stays in the seller subject only to the buyer’s contract rights.
- Practical impact for CFD operators/buyers: This is the leading Wyoming statement of the equitable-mortgage exception — the narrow doorway by which a contract for deed can be treated as a mortgage (with foreclosure and statutory redemption) instead of being forfeited. It is intent-driven and hard to satisfy; a properly drafted, ordinary contract for deed will be enforced as a forfeitable installment contract, not recharacterized as a mortgage. Compare the “in case of doubt, define it as a mortgage” rule applied to ambiguous security arrangements in marple-v-wyoming-production-credit-1988.
- Good-law status: Good law. Applied in barker-v-johnson-1979.
- Source (retrieved): https://static.case.law/p2d/577/cases/0645-01.json · Verified: 2026-06-08
Jurisdictions that follow / cite: wyoming
Disclaimer. Legal information, not legal advice. Confirm the opinion is still good law before relying on it.