Alabama notice to owner, before you furnish material

What the cap is, and what it does to a supplier who never writes to the owner

Section 35-11-210 gives the lien to every mechanic, person, firm or corporation who does work or furnishes material for a building or improvement on land. Then it sorts the claimants into two groups. A person who contracted with the owner gets a lien on the building and on the land to the extent of the owner's interest. Employees of the contractor, and persons furnishing material to him or her, get something narrower: the lien shall extend only to the amount of any unpaid balance due the contractor by the owner or proprietor.

That sentence is the whole problem. Your claim is not measured by what you delivered, it is measured by what the owner had not yet paid the contractor when you asserted it. A general contractor who is paid to within a few thousand dollars of the contract price leaves a few thousand dollars for everybody underneath, and the statute adds that the employees and materialmen shall also have a lien on the unpaid balance, which means you are sharing it.

So the ordinary Alabama supplier lien is a claim on a pot that somebody else controls the size of. Every draw the owner releases to the contractor makes it smaller, and nothing you do on the job makes it bigger.

The letter below is the statute's own answer to that, and it is the only thing in the division that changes the size of your claim rather than the process of making it.

Send it first, and the lien is for the full price you named

The escape clause is one sentence long. If the person furnishing material notifies the owner or the owner's agent in writing, before furnishing any material, that certain specified material will be furnished to the contractor or subcontractor at certain specified prices, the furnisher shall have a lien for the full price thereof as specified in the notice, without regard to whether or not the amount of the claim exceeds the unpaid balance due the contractor.

Read the two halves against each other. Without the letter your lien is capped by somebody else's payment history. With it your lien is the price you wrote down. That is the entire trade, and it costs a stamp.

Three words in that sentence do the work and they are the three that get skipped. Before furnishing: the notice is worthless if it arrives after the first delivery, because the statute conditions the benefit on having notified in advance. In writing: a phone call to the site superintendent is not this notice. Specified prices: the sentence gives you a lien for the full price as specified in the notice, so an amount that was never specified was never secured.

The owner has one move in reply and the statute prints it in the same sentence. If the owner or the owner's agent notifies you in writing, before the material is used, that they will not be responsible for the price, the full price lien does not arise. That is not a disaster: you still have the ordinary lien on the unpaid balance, and you now have written notice that this job is being run by an owner who has already refused to stand behind the material. Most suppliers would rather learn that before the truck is loaded than after.

The statute calls this form sufficient, then asks for something the form does not print

The section introduces the letter with the words the notice may be given in the following form, which shall be sufficient, and the sheet below is that form sliced out of the statute rather than retyped. Four answers: the owner, the contractor or subcontractor you are supplying, and two lines for the description of the property.

But the sentence that gives the notice its power speaks of certain specified material at certain specified prices, and the printed form does not itemise either one. It says certain material and it says the price of the material. That gap is in the statute, not in this sheet, and it is the one thing a careful supplier should deal with.

The practical answer is to send the statutory form and attach the document you already have: the quote, the order acknowledgement, the price list for the order. The form is sufficient as a notice; the attachment is what makes the phrase full price thereof as specified in the notice mean a number. Staple them together, send them as one letter, and keep a copy of what you sent.

Nothing here is recorded and nothing is sworn. There is no judge of probate involved at this stage, no filing fee and no notary. It is a letter, and the only thing it has to do is arrive before the material does. The statute does not prescribe a method of delivery, which means proving it arrived is your problem, so send it in a way that produces a receipt.

It also gets you out of a second notice most suppliers never hear about

Section 35-11-218 is the one that catches people who did everything else right. Every person except the original contractor who wants the benefit of this division shall, before filing his statement in the office of the judge of probate, give notice in writing to the owner or proprietor, or his agent, that he claims a lien on the building or improvement, setting forth the amount, for what, and from whom it is owing.

So the ordinary sequence for a subcontractor or supplier is two letters, not one: the notice of the lien claim under 35-11-218, and then the verified statement under 35-11-213. Miss the first and the second is filed by a person who did not comply with the division.

Then 35-11-218 ends with the sentence that is the reason this page exists. But the provisions of this section shall not apply to the case of any material furnished for such building or improvement, of which the owner was notified in advance as provided in Section 35-11-210.

A supplier who sent the advance notice is excused from the 218 notice for that material. One letter sent before the first delivery replaces a letter that would otherwise have to be sent before filing, and it lifts the cap at the same time. There is no second document on this site for the 218 notice because the statute prescribes its contents in prose and prints no form for it: the amount, for what, and from whom it is owing, in writing, to the owner or the owner's agent.

What happens after the letter, and the three clocks that follow

The letter is not a lien. The lien is the verified statement under 35-11-213, filed in the office of the judge of probate of the county in which the property is situated, containing the amount of the demand after all just credits have been given, a description of the property in a manner that lets it be located, and the name of the owner or proprietor. The statute says that unless such statement is so filed the lien shall be lost.

Section 35-11-215 puts three different deadlines on that filing and they run from the last item of work or material, not from the invoice date. Every original contractor has six months. Every journeyman and day laborer has thirty days. Every other person entitled to the lien, which is where a supplier to the contractor sits, has four months.

Then 35-11-221 starts a different clock. An action to enforce the lien must be commenced within six months after the maturity of the entire indebtedness secured by it. Section 35-11-220 says where: the circuit court of the county where the property is situated when the amount involved exceeds fifty dollars, the district court in all other cases.

Two more sections decide what the lien is worth once you have it. Under 35-11-211 the lien has priority over liens, mortgages and encumbrances created after the commencement of work on the building, and everything recorded before that work started has priority over you. Under 35-11-212, when the building is put up under a contract with a lessee in possession, the lien attaches to the building and to the unexpired term of the lease rather than to the freehold, which is worth knowing before you supply a tenant fit out.

Those are deadlines on a claim that can be lost by being a day late, and this page is a starting point rather than a substitute for an Alabama construction attorney on a job of any size.

Where the words came from

The form is sliced out of the text of Ala. Code 35-11-210 as published at codes.findlaw.com, current as of 30 December 2024. Nothing is retyped and nothing is paraphrased. The blanks you fill in are the statute's own blanks, in the statute's own order.

It is keyed against the same section at law.onecle.com, which is a separate edition. The two agree word for word across the form, and they print the same one hundred and twelve underscores in the same places. That last part is new: on Massachusetts chapter 254 onecle strips every blank out of the forms it publishes, so a blank on one edition had to be checked against the other. Alabama is the first section in this lane where both publishers keep them, which means the fields on the sheet below are keyed as well as the words.

findlaw is the build source rather than onecle only because it is the more current of the two. findlaw states 30 December 2024; the onecle page says it was last modified in May 2021. The capture script, the slice and the key check are in tools/alcap.py, and the build stops rather than shipping a changed form if either publisher moves a word or a blank.

Questions people ask

Once the job is running and you are getting paid on it, the paperwork that comes next is the waiver: see the Alabama statutory lien waiver forms, and conditional vs unconditional lien waiver for which of the two to sign.