Title deeds showing a small part of our outbuilding may belong to our neighbour!!!

[DildoSaggins]

Not even sure how this has happened but we are unsure what to do.

We are selling our grade 2 listed end terraced cottage. The terrace has shared access at the back and a row of outbuildings at the back of each house that are all joined up. Each properties outbuilding is pretty much directly opposite the back door.

The title deeds have shown that our outbuilding goes over into our neighbours outbuilding. Not by much by about 2 m x 3 m but clearly on the deeds our outbuilding somehow encroaches onto their land. We know that our outbuilding was knocked down, way before we owned the house (and even before the owners before them) and rebuilt it. It would seem that they maybe nicked a small part of next doors area when they rebuilt. We have been in this house 13 years and the owners before us were here 5 years so we know this was done before either of us owned the house.

It has NEVER been a problem or raised before. Not when we bought this house and not when our neighbours who possibly had some land pinched, bought their house 4 years ago. But our Solicitor has picked this up.

He said our options are to get our neighbour to sign the land over to us and get the title deeds changed, or our buyers will need to take out indemnity insurance.

We are so bloody annoyed that this has been raised now but surely this has been nearly 20 years with no issues. Is there a time frame where these things can no longer be challenged?

Has anyone been through a similar kind of land dispute that can offer some advice or has knowledge on how this should play out and what we should do?

We had this in reverse when buying our current house. Deeds showed that our property owned 50% of their driveway. Easily solved, they paid for our solicitor to draw up a transfer and we just signed it away. Took around 4 weeks as I recall.

Did you just sign it away without 'buying the land' Our solicitor says we may need to buy back the land? As technically its not ours.

No, we didn't have to buy it because on paper it was ours to freely give away, maybe your situation is different but it still sounds pretty similar. As long as the neighbour is prepared to be pragmatic. We certainly didn't want to make money out of giving them the land but we did graciously accept some very nice wine.

Just take out indemnity insurance . No biggie

Half our Driveway is apparently owned by next door. Something to do with the way the Land Registry digitised the records. There is no way it should be included in next doors as it is as all triangle that they would never have had access to. Our solicitors got the vendors to do an indemnity against it.

Be warned, if you speak to the neighbours about it, you cany get indemnity insurance as that's the whole point. Not to raise it with anyone.

I’d just offer to take out an indemnity if your buyers question it. No way would I get involved with buying back the land, your neighbours will have you over a barrel

I knew people who sold a house where the path to the back gate had been registered as the neighbour's. Probably because it got drawn in as part of the neighbour's drive. They just agreed together to change it to what it should have been.

There was no dispute though and both the neighbours had lived in the houses from new.

Thank you everyone for your comments.

Fortunately our neighbours are what we would consider to be friends and I don't think they would be the type of people to quibble over a small tiny piece of ground which has obviously been a mistake and has been ours for well over a decade.

So we will have a think about whether we go for indemnity insurance or just ask them if they will be willing to change it. I think they will be willing to change it, if I know them like I think I do.

I have just checked the Land registry map - it doesn't align with our deeds, nor the document they gave us. I know the boundaries they showed went skewed when they digitised, because the old software wasn't accurate enough, but it now looks like we own next-door's greenhouse. 🤔

I hope it goes well with your neighbours.

There a range of solutions - indemnity insurance., application to land registry,.negotiated agreement.

If the building has been there that long it shouldn't be a major issue to resolve .

If your solicitor is any good at all they should be able to calmly help you sort this and clearly set out the options

We had a similar thing. Our house is a Victorian terrace with a row of brick sheds at the bottom of the gardens. We discovered our shed/outside loo went into next doors garden by about 1.5m. Had been done historically. We were told we could probably claim it legally as it had been in place for years.

We just re-instated the wall to the correct position as marked on the deeds as felt it wasn’t fair on the neighbours (for some reason our house/garden is much wider than the others in the terrace).

We had a similar issue when we were buying. We asked our vendors to do an affidavit to say they had had uninterrupted use for their time in the property in case we ever needed to prove a prescriptive right. I think they also took out indemnity insurance.

If you use the land for 20 years does it not then belong to you anyway?
Or is that just a right of way situation?

You don’t bother deciding. Leave it to your buyers, offer an indemnity in the first instance, if they don’t accept it then go to your neighbours. Otherwise you’re just making things unnecessarily complicated.

Doesn’t matter how much of a friend you think your neighbour is, don’t underestimate how quickly that can change if they think there’s a few grand to be had. Once you have the conversation then an indemnity is out of the question- you indemnify against a potential problem, not a known one.

We've just gone through the deed of restitution route with our neighbour after it turned out the plans showed we owned half their garden. Solicitor fixed it with the land registry (which took nearly a year as LR are so slow).

First question is really why your solicitors didn't flag this up when you bought the property.

We had something similar. A small triangle of land had somehow been registered incorrectly by a developer that built on the land next to us. No idea how, but we’d owned this property for 40 years and had no need to look at the registry for a long time. It was spotted by our neighbour when their solicitor was looking at something for them. We did an Adverse Possession (no question it was our land, fully enclosed and part of our garden for forty years so no one was going to challenge it).

Yes, same question we had when our neighbours bought their house only ten years ago - how come that solicitor didn’t spot it? Anyway as it was all resolved easily we didn’t have to dig deeper, though it would have been nice to not have to have paid to register our own land correctly.