Selling part of garden

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Our house is on the corner of a crossroads, so the front of our house is one road and the side on another. The back of our garden joins the side of our rear neighbours house (hopefully that makes sense). Currently our boundary goes right up to their house so their guttering and pipe work/drainage all overhang technically onto our land, they also have a few windows that open onto our garden. They need to come onto our land to access that side of their house/do any maintenance and there's no legal right of way on the title.

We're now thinking about doing some work on that part of our garden, including putting in a garden office and it would make the majority of their wall inaccessible.

While I'm pretty confident we can do this legally as there's no right of way, we were wondering if it might make more sense to offer the neighbours to purchase a meter ish strip of land so they had access and we don't have to worry about falling out with them or having any on going requests for access. Does anyone know how would we go about coming up with a price for something like this?

You sound like a lovely neighbour to come up with this as a solution.

We bought land off next door - we got a RICS surveyor to value it - although it is difficult because there is no real market - just one seller and one buyer! The valuation in our case was the affect on the value of the houses - our neighbour's value difference was negligible, whilst ours was an increase (bigger garden!) but we were happy with the valuation.

In the first place have an initial conversation with the neighbour whether they would be interested (or have any funds). I'd expect them to pay for legal fees for both sides. If you have a mortgage then you will need their permission to sell some of the mortgaged land.
I'd put a covenant in to say they cannot develop or put outbuildings to the new boundary too.

A simpler answer might be to lease the strip of garden land to the neighbour.

Thank you, that's a good idea about leasing, I hadn't thought about that. Although I'm not sure I'd want to build (the garden office) around a piece of land that was still ours and hadn't realised any value.

Have you asked them? They might snow your hand off! Extra land would help them with access so worth asking.

Just build it with access behind, that’s why I would do, the value of rhe land will be tiny and the work to change the land deeds a right ballache.

Also wouldn’t the party wall act come in here so they would need the neighbours consent before being able to do it?

Agree. Keep the strip clear and allow them a legal right to access for maintenance. If you do otherwise will you not potentially create the opposite problem to maintain your building.

It's not really as simple as just leave a strip for their access as if they didn't buy it they would need to come into our garden much further along and walk through the garden to be able to access their property whereas if we sold them a strip they could just move their fence a bit and access directly from their front garden.

As much as we don't want to upset our neighbours, we're not really prepared to use give over part of our property or create an easement by use. We also don't have a massive garden to begin with so ideally we'd actually just keep it all I'm just trying to balance the practicalities and avoid a future disagreement when said neighbour realises they can no longer access their windows/pipework/guttering etc.

@Sunnysideup why would the party wall act come into it? I hadn't even considered that and don't know much about it.

So the strip you would sell them would be, say 1m. Would you then step your building a further 1m in , to allow you to access the back of it, for painting etc?

Yes likely behind the garden building but that would only be about 1/3rd the width of the garden. So we would lose 1m on about a 12m strip and about 2m on 3-4m. Although several of the garden offices we've looked at don't require any real access behind/to the sides as they don't need painting etc, so possibly we won't leave any gap to the boundary.

I think party wall act comes in when you build close enough to a neighbours wall they can no longer access. And your summer house would be in this category, you can only do it with their consent.

I really don’t think it’s as easy as you think. If you intend to block their access to part of your property you need legal advice before hand, because they could force you to have it removed,

You can Google it and read it op but effectively you’ve no legal right to build up to the boundary and against their wall without their consent. You need to leave a specific space, if you do not then they can seek legal redress.

Thank you. I'll look into it.

Just to be clean, they don't actually have access to the side of their property now as it's in our garden. Even if we don't put a structure there we will plant long that whole area which will make it equally inaccessible which is why we were considering talking to them to just buy it for their own access.

Do they not have an existing easement for maintenance?

We bought some land from a closed down golf course to extend our garden. It cost £100 a sq metre plus land registry and solicitors fees. About 8 years ago

If you are planning to put in a home office under permitted development, it will need to be more than 1m from the boundary. If you never get boundary, it will still need to be more than a meter from that moved boundary. If your garden isn’t big you might want to take those restrictions into account before you offer anything.

@LIZS no they have no easement for right of access and it was a point of contention between the neighbour and previous owners of our house so one hasn't been created through regularly use.

If it's less than 15 square meters it can be less than 1 meter from the boundary as far as I understand.