My husband and I disagree about a proposal put forward by a new neighbour. He can't even understand why I think the way I do and I think that he is being short sighted.
Our new neighbour has to have a mobility scooter. They have moved from a big house to a much smaller one. I know that their house sale will have made them a lot of money.
Out large garage sides on to their entrance to/from their driveway.
He initially asked to buy a section of our garage and instead we said that we would consider a rental. We didn't want to sell land.
The idea was that they would pay for the necessary repair work on our garage wall and in return get however long to rent (for free) a section of our garage.
The repair work will be approximately £8k and we would imagine that they will rent the garage for 10 years or more. This seemed a good rental opportunity.
More recently, the chap has said that when this repair work is done he wants to move our garage in (shorten the garage) by a foot and a half so that he has easier access on his driveway to get his car in and out.
I don't want this. I don't understand why I would effectively gift the land to them. They say it will still be our land but it will of course be worthless as the garage wall would end a foot and a half short of it.
There is a softener in that they they have a slightly smaller sized piece of land which they could effectively swap with ours. All sounded good but they want to make it informal to avoid land registry/solicitor fees etc.
My concern is that they, or new owners, could reclaim their foot and a half but that we never could, without completely resurrecting the rebuild garage wall.
My husband wants to do this to save on the garage work which would need doing in a year or two.
I see a lot of benefits for them and very few, intact only the rebuild but at the wrong size (!) for us?