Just need to vent - neighbour wants £60,000 for an acre of land

[livelaughlambada]

Urgh, I just want to vent. We love our home - it's in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by fields. We would really like to buy one acre of land. It's owned by some people who don't farm and don't do anything with it. Land around here is probably £10,000 an acre for farmland. They want £60,000 for the acre. We just don't have it. And if we did, we couldn't possibly justify buying it - as in even if we could borrow the money, there is other stuff that we would spend it on first that is much more 'necessary'. I don't think they believe us, but it is just what it is. One of our kids loves football and would love to play on that land. It's just such a shame that there isn't a way around it. I know that it's absolutely their right and I also know it would add value to our house to buy it (although we will not be moving ever, so that is a long way off - and we just can't spend £60,000 on land that we might actually just have to sell off before the house one day). These people don't do anything at all with the land -- they have about 20 acres and it's just getting covered with brambles and crap (not in a nice rewilding way - just actual crap they've dumped there). They come here maybe once a month. I think their logic is that it would add £60,000 in value to our house (possibly true, I have no idea, but we will not move until the kids have left home and that's a couple of decades away). The MOST annoying thing is that they're somewhere in their sixties/seventies and have told us they don't want to sell because you don't pay inheritance tax on land. So it's worth just having it sit and rot rather than anything else. It's just SO ANNOYING.

Maybe they think that you will build on it, or will sell for a massive profit.
There are things you can do, thro solicitors, to promise the land will not be built upon, I believe. Maybe it would be best to discuss with neighbours together with solicitors, for every1 to be happy with projected outcome.
(apologies if others have suggested same, in hurry so can’t wade through other replies)

I meant plenty of houses in the five square miles around me are in the middle of nowhere and have a much smaller area than that.

The value of a random acre is utterly irrelevant. It's the value of that acre attached to your house/land which changes the picture entirely. You wouldn't pay over the odds for a random acre of land a mile away, but when it's literally attached to your property, then of course it's worth more TO YOU than it's worth to anyone else. It's going to massively increase the value of your house.

@livelaughlambada please can you clarify who approached who about this and how.

We get those moving here too. 🙄
Farmers never retire though, they die in their eighties or nineties with their boots still on. They are tough !

Have you asked the owners if you could rent the field? Maybe mow a small area but leave the rest for wildlife? If they're concerned about the brambles etc taking over they might be happy to have some of it 'tidied'. I grew up in a rural are and we just pottered about in non-farmed areas, building dens etc

You have literally no way of knowing that - you just don't. Your house could easily be worth more than that if you sold it with an acre, or if someone else wanted to buy it for farm related purposes.

It sounds like the land owners are fairly shrewd and have seen it all before.

You can’t afford the purchase price.
Nothing else to be said 🤷🏻‍♀️

This makes no sense. If you bought the land, surely you would only sell it if you sold your property? Which would make it worth significantly more than 10k.

Yes, they can put a covenant on it to restrict use however they want.
If I was them I'd do that, sell for an acceptable value and include an uplift clause to benefit from the added value to OPs when she sells.

Same here! Every time we get a new neighbour it’s almost inevitable that they’ll knock on our door wanting a bigger garden. Rarely are they realistic about the price!

If you owned the land already, and someone wanted to buy it, how much would you be prepared to sell it for? That's what it's worth...

I think IHT is due on "idle or abandoned farmland" so no real tax benefit in them holding on to it!

This sounds like a good plan. The land owners will have no doubt come up heard of all sorts of reasons why they and their farmer friends should sell their land - offering the option of a convenant and financial benefit from a future sale may help to reassure them that you're not at it.

You are going to change the use. My DF has 5 acres of land with woodland attached and I can remember my DF putting a swing set on the land. And he received a letter from the council telling him to remove it straight away.
We then got a Tarzan swing in the woodland!
We rent at allotment and the rules also state no play equipment etc!

In all fairness, if you have just 1 child and live in a rural, isolated spot, it will be a lonely game of football with no one to play against.

Maybe mow a green and give him a 7iron and a putter?

Football isn't a great game for 1 person on their own. You may struggle to find 21 others... :(

60k isn't too bad a price. There's no farmland near here at 10k an acre, none. Woodlands.co.uk sell parcels if forest online, but that's 20k plus per acre for steeply sloped woods...

Maybe time to reevaluate? Either find more money, have 21 more children, or pick a new sport for your child.

@livelaughlambada I suspect the mixed bag of responses you are getting reflect the differing house (and therefore perceived land) prices in different areas.

Where I live 60k would buy you a flat with a garden. Large gardens don't add much to value. But elsewhere it wouldn't get you a utility Room extension for that money.

An acre wouldn't add 60k to our house price but elsewhere it certainly would so it's hard to judge who is more unreasonable in this situation.

I can understand your frustration but unless you get it properly valued both as land and as an extension to your plot, neither of you are in a position to say who is closer in terms of accurate pricing.

I'd get it for your own peace of mind, even if you never buy it. At least then if your 10k is wildly out you'll know.

They are in for a shock if they think that they can avoid inheritance tax on it - under the new rules it has to be actively farmed or actively managed for environmental purposes- either by them or by someone else that they have rented it to. Just letting it go to brambles without a management plan will mean that it will be included in the domestic part of their estate for IHT - but that is their problem.

If you bought it, you would have to register it for change of use - the reason land like that fetches so much more money than farm land is because you could very easily buy it, apply for change of use and then get outline planning for another property to be built on it.

Your best bet would be to ask them to rent it you under a peppercorn rent agreement on the proviso that you are allowed to mow it. You get the extra land to use as a basic play field for your son, they can then potentially claim the full relief under IHT rules, as long as they set the rental agreement up correctly.

Sorry but YABU to be miffed. The fact that farmland is valued at £10000 and acre where you live is irrelevant. It is not farmland that you would be buying.

You would be adding substantial grounds to your property which would give a major uplift to the value (and that will obviously be costed in by any seller).

Landowner generally hold on to land, for the reasons you yourself have stated. The price has to be high enough or there needs to be some other compelling reason for them to let it go.

Many years ago now we lived in a very old house with a tiny garden. Like your house, it was surrounded by farmland and I was friends with the daughter-in-law of the dairy farmer who farmed the land.

Casually one day I said to her, if your f-i-l ever considers selling some land, we'd be up for buying it.

Fast forward a few years and due to the EU regulations it was no longer viable for him to operate as a dairy farm with the cost of the upgrade to his milking parlour. So before he put the farm on the market we got a message through my friend that he would be up for a discussion about us buying a bit of land. For comparison purposes, the bit we were interested in was only part of a large field which adjoined our boundary, about a quarter of an acre.

I consulted my brother (pretty savvy on all matters financial) and he suggested we should be prepared to pay £20k, as it was worth a lot of money to us to extend our garden. From memory this all happened about twenty years ago.

Anyway, we had a lovely, but very surreal evening with the farmer and his lovely wife. Copious amounts of gin and tonic were imbibed by us all, every topic under the sun discussed, apart from the crux of the matter of the land. Finally as it was obviously time to call it a night, the farmer said he'd sell us the land, he wanted £10k for it plus we cover all solicitors costs (both sides) and be responsible for stock proof fencing. We were happy with this and this is what transpired. This is the traditional old country way of doing things - and their family had farmed their land for generations.

I would add that if the land you're thinking of buying is adjoining your house, you might need to apply for change of use. We certainly did.

We're some of these terrible old people that you don't approve of, but needed to move near our daughter and downshift, so sold to some people from the Home Counties who snapped up our cottage - most of the quarter of an acre we turned into a lovely orchard. They were thrilled with it, particularly the lovely lady buyer - who said it was always her dream to have a country cottage. It made it easier to part with it to someone who really loved it.

Maybe get into a pleasant negotiating mode and off your high horse and you might be as fortunate as we were.

So you fancy something belonging to another person but are outraged that they won't sell it to you at a price of your choosing? That's crazy. Your sense of entitlement is unbelieveable.

why would the neighbours bother doing that? They have set their price.

Omg poor you. We have had quite a few of these where planning for whatever reason needed to be redone. Absolutely awful for all involved. BNG is the biggest pain in the arse 😅 especially painful for people where it really isn’t their fault and the rules are so tight and unfavourable to basically just extracting money.

Yes, it's already the end of the matter. Why would they waste their time getting two valuations. How ridiculous.

How can you know this if you haven’t counter offered something more than 10k? They are not going to decrease the offer of their own accord but maybe they would accept £55k or something (not that you should offer it)