Land dispute!! Cheeky offer?!

@NewHere77 any update? Hope it has been relatively drama free for you.

You need a surveyor not an estate agent as they are mostly only concerned with properties that are easy to sell. A surveyor will give you a valuation. You then have to decide if you want to sell or keep the land. Don’t let your neighbour bully you into letting her have it cheap. It is not your problem if her sale falls through. Of course there is always the option of negotiating a sale directly with her buyers. Still get a market price for it.

I would say to the neighbours that you need to restore the boundary to that which your mortgage company have agreed to lend on.

It is OK to say you have thought about it and you are sorry to say you don’t want to sell, and that your consideration of the issue brought the mortgage issue into focus. So in fact you would now like to tidy it up and restore the boundary.

it is yours after all: that’s hardly confrontational.

Do you own the land up to the large trees across the field past the 2 fences? You could build rentals on that land if you wanted.

Wow! That extra triangle of land would make a massive difference to NDN garden. Personally, I would only sell if I needed the money and only for what it's really worth.

Totally agree. (And I am a lawyer).

No legal action is simple. In most cases the only winners are the lawyers.

You can prosecute her for trespass if she wont move. Simple

If your fence is not around the land in dispute then legally she may be able to claim it without paying you anything. Get a fence around the land promptly.

I still think that where your boundary should be makes your garden more rectangle and improves the ability to enjoy the view. I wouldn't sell it. I also find it hard to believe that anyone would really think their land would branch out like that without knowing they were encroaching.

There is a fence in the background behind the chicken wire and buahes, is that not your boundary line?

Sounds like a tricky situation but you can depersonalise it by saying that the correct legal position must be established & followed for future sale of both properties. It is possible to do a land swap whereby you would exchange this land for another section of garden that works for you. This would need to be okayed by both mortgage companies and handled by a solicitor so takes time. The value of your property is based on land registry documents so don’t be pressured into rushing a decision for the sake of their sale. If it falls through, so be it. Otherwise you could go straight into a dispute with somebody new. You need it corrected in order to sell your property, but this can be sorted & you are not looking to move yet. A surveyor can check & advise both parties (to neutralise things), and mark out the correct boundary. No concessions to the neighbours, it needs to match land registry.

Excellent update OP, good luck with getting it sorted and keep us updated

UK - It's not an automatic legal right, the claimant has to go to court for a judgement which they may or may win., and amazingly, you can try this where there is actually a legal owner

It’s not a very old fence if it’s the one in the wrong place.

By the neighbours pricing of land they’re valuing your entire garden at about £1500!!! Absolute jokers! See if they want to sell their garden to you at that price!

Both OP and her neighbour have not checked the boundary correctly when they bought their respective properties. The fence on that side of your boundary is OPs responsibility, at some point it has been moved from its original position. It looks fairly new so I’m presuming that the op had it replaced recently It may have been a simple error by the contractor who has just straightened it out. If the op had no idea of the actual boundary it would be easy to instruct the contractor. It doesn’t mean they have “gifted” that part to the neighbour.
I think your best course of action is to contact your mortgage lender first thing tomorrow, explain the situation and ask if you are allowed to sell the land. If not then it’s an easy course of action.
I would also pay £3-6 to download your neighbours land registry documents to see what they agreed to. If there are discrepancies then it will be obvious.
Fences do not legally demarcate your boundary they are just to secure your garden. I know plenty of people who have large gardens rurally that don’t fence to their boundaries, if you have a badgers set in that part of the garden the badgers will demolish a fence overnight. So where you put the fence is irrelevant.

We were in a very similar position when we bought our house (although I was aware that the land was ours but had been fenced off by the developers). Check if your home insurance policy has legal cover. Ours did and we used it to claim our land back. No surveyors were required in our case. Good luck

OP you need to get a fence or some sort of boundary marker up. That will stop an adverse possession claim in its tracks. She could be going to her lawyers tomorrow too to start a claim - and then whether it's successful or not, you're stuck in expensive legal hell for god knows how long.

ETA: and start using the disputed land. Pop a table and chairs there or something.

@porridgeisbae

The neighbour is being money-grabbing as she's trying to get cash from something that isn't hers.—

Well we can only speculate on their outlook but I suspect the couple just want to sell quickly to end their joint financial affairs since they are splitting up. I expect that finding out there is a question mark over ownership of part of the garden is a the last thing they need. They likely bought the property thinking what they saw was what they were buying as did the OP. Next door should be going back to their purchasing solicitor to ask how this has come about and what can be done to rectify it. Sounds like it could take some time so they may just allow the overgrown bit of ground to go back to OP.

Best wishes with sorting it out OP. It sounds like you've got a bonus bit :)

Re your second point, people didn’t used to be so money-grabbing and were often friends with their neighbours. So it is perfectly feasible that one neighbour could have given over a tiny part of their garden to a neighbour for any number of reasons.

I don't think they would've planned it to be a permanent thing, unless they were absolutely minted.

The neighbour is being money-grabbing as she's trying to get cash from something that isn't hers.

Is the fence on the legal boundary or is that where it has been put?