Batshit Neighbours - how would you respond to this message?

[carolinesfrog]

This message is from the neighbours of a rental property my Mum has.

Neighbours HATE the tenants, who are perfectly lovely people. Neighbours like to complain a lot. Neighbours have sent this message.

How would you reply?!

I think my job is affecting my brain - my mind immediately went to drugs or prostitution, rather than nails, dog grooming, or other innocent sources of income. I think your mother should investigate, advise tenants appropriately, then update neighbour, in a timely manner.

Right firstly why are they messaging you?

do they have the right to block the drive? Especially with large stone cages? Are they lit in the dark? Are they a safety hazard for cars - any low wall is a potential bugger - did they have the right to put it there - I assume just to be awkward? In which case I would have a look - if a child, adult or dog could hurt themselves it is them that would be in trouble - if this is the case take picture and warn them
in writing that any damage to a car, adult etc by their obstruction could led to a claim against them
for damages etc

second of all check with the tenant about if they are running a business and what permissions they have / at the end of the day they can have as many visitors as they like

I once had a shared driveway and the neighbour put rocks down the middle - they didn’t have the right to do this and quickly changed their minds when a written letter was given to them followed by a claim when one of our friends tripped over it and broke an ankle (after the letter) in the end they apologised and gave flowers and all was good

I’d check about the business. We went through a period of having one set of visitors each weekend. Different people for lunch, afternoon tea or dinner on Saturday or Sunday. According to one curtain twitcher we were running a business. Based on one set of visitors once a week…… Had to be running a business obviously. Our visitors also had notices put on the windshields about parking etc when they were parked legally. Utterly batshit. So don’t assume on that front.

Nice diagram!
Is the gabion they have put on the shared driveway preventing people from being able to safely turn their car around so that they then have to reverse out on to the main road?
The driveway might have been planned to enable this.

I think it's worth checking out because of insurance and liability implications. Your diagram makes it look like a shared entry to the driveway. If there's a lot of coming and going, I can understand the concern. It could also be noisy. I think your Mum should follow up to check what is going on.

As long as the tenant is not blocking the neighbours car in then they can do what t he hell they like. How many cars come and go is totally irrelevant. Dd lives next door to a hairdresser who works from home. Clients come every day all day. The only problem dd has ever had is when someone parks across her drive and she can't then put her own car on her drive. Next door soon rectify it and apologise.
I think the neighbours have deliberately put rocks in the way to cause a nuisance, these need to be moved if they are not in the neighbours private property.

Right now you are coming across as batshit. Since when does "lovely people to me" equate to "cant possibly be a mean neighbour"?

It IS illegal to run a business from home without council permission if traffic impacts on the neighbours. Didnt you read any news articles during the pandemic regarding hardressers/nail salons customers, or home businesses having multiple drivers for parcel drop off/pickups impacting domestic housing areas?

Be a responsible landlord and deal with your tenants properly.

Why would they purposefully put a cage full of rocks on the driver? They probably want to prove a point and watch cars hit the thing!

They clearly have an issue with being inconvenienced by visitors to the property next door. Do they work? Are the home all day inspecting the visitors? Clearly have nothing better to do .

Has he put the stones in the way of the tenant’s right of access?

The only response I would give to that is to ask who "who" was and how come they paid their bills for them.

Yes, when we moved in here, the house had been empty for a year, and it took a week or two for the other two houses to change their mindset about where it was ok to park especially as I worked part time and irregular hours. I did have a mega argument with builders once who thought it was ok to put their vans and work benches on my parking to leave the neighbours who they were working for's access free but once I had made clear that it wasn't on, we had no further problems. Its not ideal though.

Same here, we moved into a new build, the neighbours had moved in three months before we did and as our house was empty they used our drive for their many visitors. They did stop as soon as they knew we were moving in, (a big removals van pulling up outside gave them the heads up).
We wished we’d bought the end house, the first house as you come in off the main road. He never has problems with being blocked in.

Even though the neighbour sounds ghastly, with a shared drive I can see why they're worried; if the tenants are running a business against regulations they may expect to "borrow" his part too.
A distant family member's doing similar, with knuckle dragging "customers" revving engines at all hours, and I'm ony waiting for the whining to start if the reporting works

Anyway it's easy enough to check - if they have all permissions just tell the neighbour that then cross your fingers, and if they haven't go to the council, HMRC, DVLA, etc.

Mummyoflittledragon · Yesterday 21:18

This isn’t quite right. A tenant cannot just set up a business from home because they want to.

As a ll, I cannot unreasonably refuse my tenant to run a business. But they should seek permission and I can stop them for example if their running a business is contrary to the terms and conditions of my mortgage, if they wish to trade from the property or if the business would become the main use and residential as secondary, both of which would need planning permission.

Tenants can of course ask. Rather like they can ask for a pet, which again I cannot unreasonably refuse. I would therefore reasonably refuse someone to run a massage therapy business or similar as I would need to both change my mortgage from residential to business and the property would require a change of use to part residential, part business. An AST would not cover this so I’d also need a different business contract.

Running a business is really not the same as wfh or being self employed.

If you had read my post a little more carefully you would see that you don;t disagree with me.

Ayone can RUN whatever business they like from home, and no planner or landlord can stop them

This is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from OPERATING a business from home.

Running "the activity of controlling or taking care of something:"

No-one needs permission from anyone to sit at a desk in their home, using their laptop and phone to do desk based work OR run a business.

HOWEVER, the nature of the business might mean that they can't OPERATE the business from home.

If the business is graphic design and the occupant of the house is the sole employee then they can RUN and OPERATE the business from home. Landlord, AST, mortgage - all irrelevant. I can sit at my desk at home and it matters not whether I am writing a short story as a hobby or running a multi-national company.

If the business is graphic design and the occupant of the house has 100 eployees he cannot operate the business from home with 100 desks lined up for his staff. His home does not have planning permission to be an office, and his AST or mortgage is on a home not an office. Equally if his business is making explosives then he can't do this from home either, for obvious reasons, whether he is the sole employee or he has loads of staff.

Perhaps I am being petty here, but I think that it is important to be clear that desk based work (including running a business, and including doing desk based work for your business) is no-one else's business. It only becomes an issue if the business OPERATES from the home, and that operation is such that it impacts or potentially impacts on others (noise, smell, visitors etc etc).

IANAL and if I am missing something I would love to know.

I would also like to know about where to draw the line. Fine, in this case, means "no-one else's business, not landlord or bank or planners".

I turn my garage into a gym and work out there - fine.

I invite my sister over once a week to work out with me - fine.

I ask her to pay me £10 per hour for the benefit of my knowledge and because I am hard up, and she is happy to pay because it's cheaper than her old personal trainer and she feels sorry for me - fine

I stop having my sister over and advertise and have one customer per week. Fine or not? I don't know.

I have 8 vistors per day, 6 days a week, and my train-out regimes involve loud chanting that can be heard for 50 yards in any direction. Not fine.

I mean it is both unreasonable and reasonable. It’s a bit unreasonable that they are somewhat hinting at the property owner being responsible for damage. However if the tenant is running a business at a property not registered for running business then that is obviously something that needs looking into. Beyond that if there are cars coming and going that cause damage then the neighbour should get a camera and then any damage can be reported via police non-emergency with video footage of license plates as well as video evidence for insurance companies.

Please just talk to your tenants. So many people look down on renters. Please check whether the tenant is actually running a business first. The neighbour may just be trying to get the tenants into trouble. We also don't know for sure it was a tenant's visitor who hit the 'stone thingy?'

It is hard being a renter if you have unpleasant neighbours. Give them the benefit of the doubt.also

It sounds like the neighbours have form and therefore you are looking at the email through a lens of knowing they are batshit but that email in itself comes across as reasonable to start (notifying the landlord of a business being illicitly run at the address without her knowledge) and possibly reasonable to finish (depending on where they put the gambion).

It's a bit like when there is a knock at the door, or the phone rings.... You dont have to answer it.

But equally I'd want to know more about the business...

Is it home therapy, turorimg, hairdressing, indoor cultivation of "exotic tobacco", "illicit pharmacy" massage parlour or brothel?

How do they actually know it's a business? Have the tenants spoken to them about it, or have they seen genuine evidence? They might just have a very active social life, or even just a couple of visitors on the odd day, which somebody with a grievance might grossly exaggerate to 'a lot, every day'.

If you know they have form for being racist, they could already have preconceptions and conclude that "Asians are obsessed about earning money and they keep having Asians coming to their house - must be some kind of forrin-type business as all Asians run their own businesses, don't they" - when it's just two or three cars of friends or even family members visiting some days. They might even be jealous that the tenants have friends who actually want to come and spend time with them!

An awful lot of people are very prejudiced against neighbours who rent and genuinely believe they should have fewer rights and/or be held to a higher standard of 'neighbourliness' (i.e. 'doormatry'). Add racist views into the mix, it can easily escalate.

I didn't know what a gabion cage was - well, I knew what they were but not that they were called that. They have the right to put it there, assuming it's completely on their own property, which isn't intended for communal manoeuvring, but that must be so very ugly. Who wants the drive of their residential home to look like a building material supplier's yard?

They might have a very genuine reason for grievance, be grumbling about something very petty but where they are technically right, or they might just be inventing it: deciding that they don't like those 'forriners who are only tenants, you know' and then finding anything to claim has happened to show their presumed superiority. Whether this is them or not, a lot of people, who live in very small worlds and have precious little going on in their lives, really do enjoy complaining about the neighbours as their hobby.

You need to find out the type of business. Is it’s a legitimate one or a knocking shop

I don't think you should post private messages on the internet.

I’d tell the racist neighbour to piss off. I would do nothing to help him.

I bet there isn't a business at all and the neighbour's not happy at general family & friends visiting every day! I had a neighbour like this once. I was very seriously unwell and had carers coming in 3 times a day for around 6 months. Batshit neighbour reported me for "running a business, likely a brothel"

I was bed-bound and was having my bags changed and sponge baths! One of my caters was a male who came twice per day and that's what did it. She called the DWP multiple times resulting in a temporary loss of benefits (obviously had to claim as obviously couldn't work for a period of time) including my PIP which paid for my carers! Yes it was reinstated but I missed 2 weeks income and had to drop down to one visit per day for 10 days. All because of a nosey, interfering busy body jumping to conclusions

*Pixiedust1234 - It IS illegal to run a business from home without council permission if traffic impacts on the neighbours. Didnt you read any news articles during the pandemic regarding hardressers/nail salons customers, or home businesses having multiple drivers for parcel drop off/pickups impacting domestic housing areas?

Be a responsible landlord and deal with your tenants properly.*

As many of us have said, maybe find out if there IS even a business as many here have been accused by batshit neighbours of running a business from home when it’s actually a few relatives or friends visiting on occasion. Many neighbours are just batshit and/or spiteful and will lie and twist reality to cause grief. So maybe a ‘responsible’ landlord would ascertain this first before ‘dealing with tenants properly’!

I'm sorry, but to start with I thought that this was a joke, and then realised that it's actually serious.

If she hasn't already, your relative needs to check the tenancy agreement to see if it allows tenants to carry out a business , or perhaps the tenant is 'working from home'; a very different position. If the latter is the case perhaps this needs to be discussed, but in this case, it's worth checking if the COVID position remains ' working from home if possible or if there is a medical reason why the tenant needs to work from home.

But in any case, if they are good tenants it may be worth taking this message to CAB and get some legal advice. I suspect that the neighbours are Going to be a pain whatever you do.