There are a couple of dilapidated garages near us, and we live in a terraced house, so a garage would be really useful. They belong to people on our street, elderly couples who no longer use them. They are in complete disrepair and would fall down if touched. There are some other garages beside them that are in regular use so the right of way is maintained and well looked after. No asbestos in them as far as I know.
We'd like to approach the owners and see if they'd be interested in selling, and we would remove the existing garage and replace with a new one. However, we have no idea what price to propose. We are in the NW in a small village and no garages have exchanged hands without being part of a property that we know of, so there's not much precedence.
Has anyone bought a garage on its own? Did you offer to pay the vendors conveyance fees as well as your own? Is it a relatively simple thing to do or is it similar to buying a house? The people who own the garages are not short of cash so they wouldn't be gaining much from this I'd imagine. However, they'd be doing us a big favour, so I'd want to make the process easy for them. If it put them under stress I wouldn't do it as they are in their 80s and I'd feel bad. I want to get a feel for how this would work before even approaching them in case they felt pressured.
There's no chance of building anything liveable on these plots either as there's communal access and no power, water, etc, they're just garages for storage.