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.

Depends which NP actually.
Anyway, I think you are massively underestimating the going rate for a small piece of land. Actually a small package of land in a NP goes for more than land elsewhere.
For reference there is a small piece of land adjacent to mine, also in a NP. This piece qualifies as part of the adjacent farmer’s land total, although it is not used as farmland, it’s a section of track and a bit of bank. If the farmer wanted to sell this, we would buy it as before becoming a track it traditionally formed part of our garden, and it isn’t used as a track anymore. We chatted to him about it, and he isn’t sure that he wants to sell it as it’s hassle for him, plus it means changing his total acreage. It’s about a tenth of an acre and the price suggested was around £5000 to £6000. This was a quote from a reasonable local land agent, not the farmer. It’s a normal price. You assumed as agricultural land is £10,000 an acre that this is the cost of one acre but that isn’t the case. Yes if you were buying 90 acres that would be the case. A one acre paddock next to a house, which increases the value of that house significantly, is not going to be £10,000 anywhere, and certainly not in a NP.
I really hope you are not one of those people who moves to the countryside for the rural idyll and then complains about local farmers and feels weirdly entitled to their land as we get loads of those here.

Nobody's paying £10,000 an acre for agricultural land attached to their curtilage. That price has been bandied about for DECADES and is seriously out of step unless referring to a LOT of acres. And even then, with corporates buying agri land for carbon off setting the price of land has skyrocketed. It's part of the problem with farmers facing inheritance tax. Their land is worth so much more now (despite not being able to earn as much from it due to global warming) on paper that many more small farmers are being pushed into the inheritance tax bracket.

Your neighbours will have to pay capital gains tax (18% for low rate tax payers) if they sell to you.

I doubt it's massively overpriced OP. We added 1 acre of farmland (Scrub, brambles, unfenced to our adjacent garden back in 2018. Even then the landowner wanted £30k. Thankfully we settled on £25k but I'm not surprised at all that £60K is wanted. It will add more then that to your property price.

If they put it up for auction, no doubt some speculator would buy it for an inflated price, hoping to get planning permission. A patch of land at the bottom of our garden was sold to someone for £100k(!) twenty years ago - the original owner had already failed to get planning permission. The current owner's applied for pp a few times, and gone to appeal, but not yet got permission. I'm sure, despite this history, if he put it up for sale, someone else would buy it for an inflated price.

I genuinely can't keep up. Am I entitled for presuming to purchase the land because how-very-dare-I-when-I-do-not-have-60k-to-buy-it or am I am entitled for being too-impossibly-wealthy-for-considering-buying-a-field-for-my-children-to-play-in? Am I too rich or too poor? It is impossible to keep up.

Depends on the price and whether the parents might realistically consider it a long-term investment in their own property I suppose. The principle itself doesn't make me agog, but that's not to say the practicalities wouldn't.

I have a sinking feeling that the op lives near me as the number of people who move here and behave like this is quite surprising.

At the end of the day, how much will it increase the value of YOUR house if you have an extra acre of land attached to it. That's the real market value of that particular acre of land. You really can't use the "£10k per acre" value as that's irrelevant in your particular case as you benefit far more than the current owner through ownership of that one acre.

I mean roughly 5 acres went for roughly 50k about a mile closer to town, with water and the same level of access but much more convenience. I think it's extremely unlikely that they would pay wildly more for a less convenient piece of land. I'm not sure who all these experts are jumping in but I do know land values around here!

I think you are way off with your valuation of £10K, whilst that may be the UK average if you are buying a farm of maybe 100 acres+, small pieces of land like this are far more expensive as they are very sort after. Although their figure of £60K is fairly high I don't think its as far off the average for this size of land as your valuation, its also likely that a sale would mean they need to pay capital gains tax so with also loosing the inheritance tax advantages its probably not worth their while selling for less. Its understandable that you are considering the advantages for your children but its also understandable that they are thinking of whoever eventually inherits their estate.

It's not being greedy. It's recognising the value of an asset. Would you be willing to sell your house to someone for less than it's market value because they decided they would make better use of it than you?

60k isnt a wild valuation for a small plot to add to a house. It’ll easily add that much value and probably a lot more to your property. We are farmers and have sold a few garden extensions like this, initially people are like the OP, incredulous that we aren’t keen to sell it to them for agricultural value! If your not willing to pay a significant uplift, why would they be keen to sell it to you!
Agricultural land is a lot more than 10k an acre on average - the 5k vertical hills and Dartmoor bogs bring the average price down. You’d be lucky to find anything below 15k for 10 acre plus parcels, and around us it regularly sells for 25k plus an acre. And small one, two, three acre plots are pretty much name your price.

And then you’ve legal fees, solicitor would be probably 3-5k, land agent/surveyor to peg out the area, 1K, and then CGT…

I'm not valuing it at 10k. I'm saying that's what I'd get for it if I had to sell.

Given the number of people who have also tried to demand sales of various parcels of our land, they could also live near me. The level of entitlement is astounding.

They don't want to sell it that much OP. They have sensed an opportunity to make a good amount of money, but if they don't get the price they want, they're not interested.

aha! an "old people should have nothing" person

How do you work that out?

I can see that this is annoying for you. From your perspective the land is unused and going to waste. From your neighbour's perspective its their land and they dont want to sell. Setting a high price on it, as others have pointed out, is a polite means of refusal.

I dont drive and I had a neighbour ask to park one of their vehicles on my drive. "What a pity I did not use it" Was I supposed to feel guilty because she had more cars than she could fit on her forecourt? I could tell she had no intention of paying and wanted a free favour. And she had not thought through the insurance implications. As soon as I mentioned registering with a company and renting it out at a commercial rate via the app she backed off. That was my polite way of telling her to eff off.

Because that is what it's worth when its only use to anyone else is farmland. I accept it is worth more to me than it is to anyone else. But if I had to sell, that is what it would be worth.

"I genuinely can't keep up. Am I entitled for presuming to purchase the land because how-very-dare-I-when-I-do-not-have-60k-to-buy-it or am I am entitled for being too-impossibly-wealthy-for-considering-buying-a-field-for-my-children-to-play-in? Am I too rich or too poor? It is impossible to keep up"

It's very easy to keep up OP, if you re read all the responses they are all telling you the same:

You are having a tantrum because you want something you can't have afford.

So you’re in the middle of nowhere surrounded by farmland but also surrounded by other houses? 🤔
This tale has more holes than Swiss cheese.

Yes, but you're still not accepting that the value of that acre to "someone else" is a lot less than the value of it to you and the increase you'd enjoy in your home value by having so much extra land attached.

If you had to sell it that's what it's worth - where has this come from and on what basis OP? You are making this up as you go along now!

No, I'm just using it to assess the value of an acre of land around here.

But how much extra would your house be worth with that extra acre of land attached?

A hell of a lot more than if you just sold a random acre of land separately.