want to buy part of next doors garden? how much should I offer?

[chocolateshoes]

hmmm. Our neighbours are moving & their house is being bought by the company relocating them. We overlook their garden & it would make alot of sense for us to buy this stretch. Biut I don't know where to start - how much should I offer? How much is their garden worth to the overall value of their house? How much would it add to the resale value of ours? I know we'd need to pay legal fees etc but have no idea how much land is worth. May not be able to afford it anyway? Has anyone any experience or ideas of how to go abou this please

Happy new year!!

The people diagonally behind us bought a 20ft x 10ft strip of land from our neighbours. They simply knocked on the door and asked them. So that is an option.

When we bought our house there was a letter delivered to the estate agents for them to pass to the new owner of the house (us) asked for us to sell part of our garden to the people behind us. We declined as the reason for buying the (small) house was the big garden.

I would approach your neighbours first of all. They will be able to deal with it or refer you to teh company buying their house. If they are willing to sell the garden you could then get the plot valued (no idea how to go about this) or just offer what you see as a fair price and see what they say.

Good luck!

You'd need a surveyor or EA to advise. Next door offered us 10k for part of ours(100x30ft-ish) but it is worth more than that to us as it forms half our garden.

Oh btw, the 20ft x 10ft strip was sold for I believe either £2000 or £2500. But it came with the stipulation that the new owners removed the 6 lleylandii trees on the plot themselves and put proper fencing in. Which they did.
This was approximately 7 years ago.

oh gosh fast replies ladies - thanks! Had though we'd approach the neighbours 1st as there's nothing to lose - but could do with a figure in mind I guess. LIZS what an EA?

We tried to do this last month - and the estate agent gave us a rough guide to how you calculate this. I'll check with DH what it was and let you know?

thanks Moodlum - reckon its 20 x 8ft max

EA is estate agent.
I'd get a couple of local agents to value the land and then take it from there.

Right have checked with DH

Take the value of your house. For the sake of argument call it £300,000. Then look at the rebuild value of the house (on your insurance details) - call that £150,000. Then call the remaining figure, £150,000, as the value of the plot of land on which your house is built.

If you want to increase your plot of land by 10% then it would be worth 10% of £150,000.

DOes that make any sense? It only vaguely makes sense to me, tbh but do you get the gist?

thanks pannacotta - being stupid - late night last night! OK Moodlum - thnik I'm there - will relay that all to DH. Would we have to pay agents to value land do you thikn & would it be lots. Don't want to pay for things & then neigbours say they're not interested

One of our neighbours has asked us to buy part of their land recently and we were told that garden land is priced at £50,000 per acre.
We were also told that we would have to pay for the land owners solicitors fees as well as our own.
I would be wary of estate agent valuations since the EA for our neighbour has told him he can ask for 50k per acre (ie. garden price) when the land in question consists of 2 large drainage ditches and what is best described as swamp. We think the agent just looked at the size on the map and calculated from there.

So have you negociated better price Millarkie?

No. Estate agent has told them it's worth 50k an acre and that's what they want. Bearing in mind we didn't ask for it (they asked us to buy it) we have simply told them it's not worth that much because it is swamp and because we already have a huge garden so it won't add value to our property. Only benefit in owning it is that we can plant some (swamp-loving) trees on it in case anyone ever builds houses in the field behind, so that's a chance we'll take.

WE bought some of our back neighbours' filed a coiple of years ago.

Our garden was quite small originally so we paid what they asked as we really wanted it, and it made our house/garden into a long term place for us.

WE didn't bother with EA, and yes, we paid both sets of solicitor's fees, as i believe is the norm. They also stipulated that we had ot erect a 5' fence within 2 weeks of purchasing.

It was v simple to do.

Thy have since moved and one of our neighbours is approaching the new family as she would lie ot buy a piece of their land now! (they own most of the land behind our road and much of it isn't used)

Thanks. Some good advice. It seems to be you pay what you think its worth iyswim. We're not desperate at all but it makes sense. Good advice about paying both sets of legal fees. Think I'll send DH round in the morning!