Buying section of neighbours garden

thesimian

Not entirely convinced this in the right area so please feel free to shunt this thread where appropriate!

Ok, I am thinking about approaching my neighbour regards buying a strip of their garden. the area in question is to the side of their house and next to the driveway of mine; we have a long driveway which has a strip of grass running down the side which belongs to my neighbour, their back garden fence also runs down this side but the area in question is not within their fence and is outside - if you get what I mean!

My driveway is quite narrow and it would be nice if I could purchase some of this strip so that I can widen it out at a later date, we do actually own an area of the grass as it gets nearer my house - we are set back from our neighbour. Our neighbour does have a flower bed running along their fence on this side and they tend the grass; I am thinking that were we to purchase it then I have no problem in the flower bed remaining if they want to keep it going as I dont need to use all of that area for the drive extension.

The area we are looking at buying would be about 6ft by 10ft (ish), anyone got any idea how much this might cost (South East country) and what sort of legalities would we need to puruse should our neighbour agree.

Has anyone on here done something like this at all? Any help is appreciated, even any guidance on how to broach this subject with our neighbour.
Thanks

Gruit

We had something very similar (to widen driveway), these are the steps we went through:

Got a surveyor to price the land - neither of us could build an extension or anything similar on it, and he didn't think it made a great difference to the house prices, so he priced it at the nominal cost, which was around £1000 for 10square metres-ish

Obviously you can skip this if you can just agree a price between you.

Each party then got a solicitor to draw up the contract, who would pay for the solicitors, land, and making the fence good etc.

The mortgage company has to be involved too if the people selling the land have a mortgage, as it may reduce the value of the property.

The solicitors need to send the details of the transfer to the land registry with a plan - we got that free from the original surveyor.

Probably took about a month altogether, I think costs were:
land £1000ish
solicitors x2 £600 (inc some land registry costs)
surveyor £200
and the fence move

I'm sure there is money to be saved from that though!

Gruit

As for asking the neighbour, you have to remember the real hassle factor of them having solicitors, mortgage company valuations etc.

I would suggest either going to them with a figure, or a suggestion to use a surveyor - people can get very unrealistic price wise if you just say 'I want to buy some land'

Remember, the land can be whatever shape you want, so you could just buy the grass and not the flowerbed?

Oh, and don't panic when you can't see the new plans online on the land registry site!

Their online systems don't seem to be able to handle big enlargements needed to show very thin small bits of land like that, so you have to get them by post.

thesimian

Thanks!.
You have given me lots to think about. I was hoping that it would be in the region of about £3000 to purchase. As per your situation, the stretch of land is nowhere near big enough to develop/entend a house on. Its not next to my neighbours house and their back garden fence doesnt enclose it, actually its a bit weird layout as we already own the section as it nears our house (widens out to form our front lawn.

I was also thinking along the same lines that we leave the flower bed, we dont need the full width to be honest; just a bit wider so we can add a curve and then increase the drive on our existing front lawn.

Our neighbour is unlikely to have a mortgage, they have lived there since it was built 29 years ago and are pensioners - lucky them!

Think that I might be cheeky and think of a price and then sound them out, likelihood is they will turn me down.