Can an estate agent use photos of my garden?

[AlanThePig]

Tonight I happened to look out of my lounge window to see two men halfway up my drive taking photos. Unfortunately I couldn't just run out and by the time I could they had gone.

I think it was possibly the landlord of the house up the road that is about to come on the market and I think it would likely be an estate agent. My front garden has a large, natural pond in it and I assume he was photographing that to add to the house listing. I have two issues with this..

1. It's my property.
2. The house has no view over my garden at all.

I'm fully expecting to see my garden on rightmove next week, and I will be calling them, but can I insist they remove the photos?

Get your friend to email and ask about it

I think it would probably be a bit obvious now.

I've woken up to ducklings as well this morning. Eleven of the little cuties came trooping out of the duck house around 10am. ❤️

Reply from owner with an apology and promise to remove. Apparently they wanted to show the view from the front of the property (which isn't the view but hey ho)
Its hopefully going so all is well again. Until the next bloody time

It is beautiful - and so are plenty of private gardens around me and I wouldn’t dream of trespassing onto their property to take pictures of their garden then plonking them online as nice things to look at if I advertised my house with Airbnb! Well done OP. Hope it is removed.

Just to add, after a few incidents (not just people wandering but van drivers just reversing over the grass) we installed a large electric gate with a small pedestrian gate at the side so it's now even clearer that this isn't public land.
DH is still wiping tears from his eyes at the cost, but it has solved a lot of issues we were having. For example, delivery drivers would open the old gates and drive up anyway.

Meanwhile, here are my new additions of this morning. Nature is a cruel beast though and realistically only a couple of these will make it.

Nature is a cruel beast though and realistically only a couple of these will make it

How gorgeous.

I'm sure you've already thought of it OP, but to protect them you could go full on Peter Viggers and get a floating duck island (£1.6k I believe).

Or try and float an old pallet. Might be a nice quarantine DIY project.

I'm sure you've already thought of it OP, but to protect them you could go full on Peter Viggers and get a floating duck island (£1.6k I believe).

If you look upthread there is a photo somewhere of our floating house. I think it cost me about £120 so sadly not as flash as the duck island, but I consider every penny well spent now. Our female went in there about a month ago so we thought she might be on eggs. She did the same last year but her eggs didn't hatch and she slowly threw them out of the house one by one.

We do have sparrow hawks, foxes and herons here as well that will pick off a duckling, but on the plus side we currently have a pair of canada geese who chase away the local cats and fox so that might help a bit.

Wonder if I can persuade DH to another house? hehe

What a lovely (ducklings) and CF (AirBnB) update OP.

Gosh. That's very cheeky. Have you had to turn away a lot more picnic-ers since it's been listed? Hope its resolved quickly.

@TheMandalorian I think it's only been on since Christmas, so few visitors. It's usually when the weather warms up we find people appearing. Fortunately we're quite hidden away so unless you know it's here you aren't likely to find it, kind of why we don't want it advertised.

We have spoken to a few neighbours with young kids and said they are welcome to bring them for some supervised exploring whilst in lockdown though. You can walk all around it and there is lots to see this time of year with frogs and newts everywhere.

I have no objection to sharing this wonderful space with people, if they just ask me!

It’s on booking.com too. But pond mention removed.

Love the boat.

I have nothing to add other than that is a beautiful pond

@Comefromaway How did you find it?!?! That's impressive!

It’s stunning OP. I hope your ducklings make it! We live near a local stream and sometimes have ducks visiting in our garden. It’s hard to explain to 2yo DD why she can’t go outside when they’re there and shout at them!

It must be difficult trying to strike a balance between protecting the wildlife, your privacy and letting the community enjoy it (in a safe and non-intrusive way). I hope you manage to get the issues resolved.

Thanks @comefromaway never thought to look there! Does seem to have gone from all places now so hopefully that’s the end of it.

Small ducklings update. All eleven still here this morning and mum is bringing them over for food with her. I did find a large patch of feathers last night so I think there may have been twelve initially

Nothing too sinister. Something sounded familiar from when I was looking at accommodation close to a particular tourist attraction & I remembered the OP from a thread about weather in the county I live.

@Comefromaway I'd assumed that market was what they were aiming for, though at £700 for 5 nights seems a bit steep.

Maybe I should put my spare room on there 😂

OP, just wanted to say I feel very envious of your environment. That pond is just beautiful and I can only imagine how wonderful it must be to watch all the wildlife. I'd be out there at all hours for sure! Fingers crossed most of your little ducklings survive.