Has anyone bought some of their neighbour's garden?

[silversixpence]

The house we are looking at has a shorter garden than everyone else on that side of the road. The next door neighbour owns the rest of the garden so his is an L shape. The difference is about 40 foot. Has anyone successfully approached a neighbour to buy some of the garden and how much would it be worth? It's just to add to the garden not for development etc. what is the process legally?

an old neighbour tried to buy some of our garden - he got a surveyor to put a price on it and said they would pay for all the conveyancing fees. we didn't want to sell though so it went nowhere.

Peggy can you give me any idea of the size and how much the surveyor thought it was worth? Would selling have made your garden too small? The neighbour hasn't done anything with the extra space and already has a 130' garden so I am hoping they will consider it.

he thought our garden land was worth £15 sq mtr. - our piece of land was about 150 sq mtrs in total. conveyancing was going to cost about £1000 iirc.

sorry no selling the land would not have made it too small as we have a really big garden - we just didn't want to sell as the size of garden was one of the main reasons we bought the house in the first place.

We also didn't think the cost of the garden reflected the loss in value to the house in total. so say we bought our house for 300k - if you took off half the garden the house may only be worth 250k however they thought we should sell the land for 3k - it didn't add up for us.

Our neighbours bought part of another neighbours for around £30k I think. It was around three quarters of an acre, so much bigger than the area you are talking about.

There is a formula somewhere for how much land is worth. Also into the equatuon is how much it is worth to you, and how much it would increase the value of your house by.

I would approach them in the first instant to see if it's something they would consider and be interested in.

A friend of mine did this recently and paid around £50k for a piece of land that constituted 3 garages and a bit of a driveway. SE but outside London, if that makes a difference.

They got surveyors in to get an idea of price and all came out pretty much the same, so perhaps they used a formula.

It took months to get the title deeds amended afterwards too, something to bear in mind if you or the neighbour might be considering selling.

A onto thing to bear in mind is that the neighbour might not be able to sell the land. We have a clause in our title deeds that forbids reallocation of our land, although I imagine that is unusual.

We have an L shaped garden and own half of next doors garden on a separate title deed so we could sell back to them but part of the reason we bought the house was the big garden so it would take a lot for us to sell it back.

We spent £20K (if I recall correctly) buying a piece of garden land about 70 ft by 30 ft. The sellers originally wanted to put a restrictive covenant on it that we would not build on it (in theory, if we bundled some of it with our own garden, you could get a house on it). But we refused and we got it anyway as the vendor was selling his house at the time too, so actually wasn't that bothered. However, a restrictive covenant might be requested/a sweetener if your neighbour is still going to live there.

We also purchased a large veg plot sized (maybe 15 ft x 15 ft) from the farmer when we purchased this house. Only paid £1.5 K and his legal fees. This land though was of no interest to the farmer (it had been boxed off when he fenced his land ages ago and everyone assumed it belong to our house until we looked in detail at the deeds).

Value-wise, the starting point has to be how much value it adds to your own house/takes away from their house.

Process wise it is very simple - both work through solicitors as you would with a house purchase. It is standard for you to pay the vendor's legal fees, and expect your solicitor to do most of the chasing and legwork.

We had an L shaped garden in the 90's it went behind the next two houses and one of the neighbours offered us £5000 for his 'portion' which was roughly 5% of the then value no idea why 5% but he seemed to think it mattered. We said no.

I'm not sure it would make a significant difference to the value of the other property but would probably increase the value of ours. It's already a good sized garden for London but we could then have a big veg plot and space for a summer house.

Do you think the neighbour who has the L shaped garden actually bought garden that once belonged to the house you are interested in?

Apparently that part of the garden was a disused path or road and when it was sold off in the 50s the neighbours bought the sections behind both houses.

I am not getting my hopes up after reading the thread, so will see if our offer is accepted first! The neighbours are expecting twins so maybe they will decide they don't have time to tend to a huge garden

silver just a wild thought but have you looked at neighbours title ( the one with the plan ,they give examples ) at Land Registry www.gov.uk/search-property-information-land-registry to check that the neighbours actually bought and do own the land ?

I used to live in a terrace that had an old footpath running along the back of the gardens .We all just added it to our land ,we didn't buy it .

Although ....sorry just thought if your neighbours did enclose the road behind them over 10 years ago they probably have adverse posession /rights granted by long use .Tho they wouldn't own it unless they'd applied to LR to have it added to their title .Which they may not have done because since 2003 the LR would have notified whoever did own the road .

Sorry all a bit complicated and I'm not an expert ,but have researched adverse posession a lot .

I did a quick land registry search and it seems there is one deed for the house and a separate one for the land behind the house so that's not an option, it was an interesting thought though.

We've put an offer in, fingers crossed.

Just to update, we did buy the house and moved in about 2 months ago. Our neighbours are nice and we love it here

Now we're settled we'd like to approach the neighbours about whether they are interested in selling us the bit of garden backing on to ours but don't want to go about it the wrong way - what's the best way? I was planning just to say face to face that we would like to buy it if they ever wanted to sell. I am really keen though but don't want to be pushy. The wife did mention to me that they can't see round the L shape when the children are playing (they have a 3 year old and twin babies) and plan to install cameras so wanted to make the offer before they do that.

Just say it like that - state you're keen but don't be pushy. Let them get used to the possibility before trying to discuss price.

Just ask but be prepared for them to say no!

We have an L-shaped garden and our neighbour wants to buy the bit behind his garden. We don't want to sell it and if we did they would have to be willing to pay over the odds for it.

We were not bothered by the neighbour asking, they pretty much said what you said above and we just said no, sorry we don't want to sell. All fine. We know now that if we did want to sell then we could.

Silver did you ever buy the land? I'm intrigued 🙂

We did this. Similar story - next door was L shaped around our smaller garden. Neighbour was elderly and liked that we were a family and could use his old garden. Initially asked if he would consider selling (no mention of price at this stage). He said yes, we got a surveyor to value it (based on gain to my house, loss to his). Loss to his was negligible really. We paid all conveyancing costs. That took ages because of issues with a covenant to restrict development (mainly so I didn't flip the plot to a property developer on the other side!).

We were very lucky - it has made our garden so much better. An extra 45 square metres, SW London, was £15k 4 years ago (bear in mind the covenant about development though).

I have left the plot on a separate title so I didn't need to involve my mortgage company, financed separately. Then I could sell to other neighbours in future if ever got into financial difficulty. If we move it might be a bit more tricky having two plots to sell - may need to merge before selling.

Re the covenant. Horrible things. Defining development is tricky , and I don't like things persisting for ever. So we agreed with a definition of development being "A building requiring planning permission" and the trigger for payment being when foundations dug. The covenant to expire in 25 or 50 years (I can't remember which). So I could build a shed, or summer house without falling foul of the covenant, but it stops a back garden house.
Note that planning can be obtained by people who don't own the land!
So I had to also add the digging of foundations bit. Financial bit was a 50-50 share of the value gain with the other party.

it took over a year due to poor solicitors regarding the covenant wording.

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