The High Court of Australia in Crown Melbourne Ltd v Cosmopolitan Hotel (Vic) Pty Ltd, by majority, has found that a statement made during lease negotiations by a landlord to tenants to the effect that the tenants would be “looked after at renewal time” did not give rise to a binding and enforceable collateral contract which obliged the landlord to offer a renewal of the leases. The majority judges further found that the statement did not give rise to an estoppel which prevented the landlord from denying that it was obliged to offer a renewal of the leases.
Although in submissions made to the High Court, the tenants claimed that the estoppel advanced by them was a proprietary rather than a promissory estoppel, possibly because they thought that a less strict approach to the requirement for certainty of the representation was taken in proprietary estoppel cases, most of the members of the majority considered that the estoppel asserted by the tenants in the proceedings had always been a promissory estoppel and that the case was not the occasion on which to resolve the question as to whether there was a single, unified doctrine of estoppel. Read further about the case here.
