Neighbour Issue – Not sure what to do!
Backstory:
I bought my property back in January, there is a piece of land behind my garden that was originally planned to be a park however the developer located a park elsewhere. As soon as my purchase completed I started enquiries around purchasing this land, as my home office is in the back of the house and any other future uses of the land could cause me an issue.
After a lot of legal work to confirm removal of council restrictions, I proceeded to purchase via the developer who still owner the land.
Earlier this week I took a fencing company over to view the land to cost for fencing.
A neighbor came across incredibly angry at the purchase of the land, I believe he had been informed by another neighbor it was quite embarrassing in front of a company quoting for work!
They claim:
They had an agreement to split the land with the previous owner (This wasn’t known to me)
They should have been given first refusal of purchase.
Technically they had no rights to “first refusal” the land was not for sale until the large amount of work with the council was completed! They have also had 17 years to purchase the land.
I guess I could sell a portion of the land to them although they will want it for the very low price I paid not accounting for the huge amount of legal work, it’s not enough land to do much with if I did split into half.
What would you do?