Fence position

Bufger

Afternoon MSE,

firstly i just want to say this isnt bothering me too much but i do just want to check where i stand with it for the future.

Last november i bought my house, moved in and all is fine. Decided to sit out in the garden one of the days it was slightly above freezing and noticed that the fence with my neighbour is way over my side, there is actually a portion of my kitchen extension in their garden as its about 2ft away from where i would expect! i had a look at the deeds and compared them to google earth as in my area you can zoom right in, it does look like they have a bigger garden than they should have.

They used to get on really well with the people i bought the house from and the fence looks very new, i suspect they may have had a cash deal or something else to rob a bit of our garden before they sold it.

As i said, im not too bothered at the moment and i would certainly put a good neighbour relationship as a higher priority than a bit of garden but if it comes to the fence needing replacement in the future should i just say? could i actually legally ask them to move it now and they would have to? Ownership of that side is unknown on my deeds.

Just wondering whats what when it comes to fences and land theives!

Nosht

Funnily enough when we moved house last year & I was studying the deed plan I discovered that my neighbour had added some of the previous owner's land onto hers, about a yard.
This explains why we do not have a clothes pole in our garden & both neighbours do.
I might do something about it in future but not yet.

N.

Fire_Fox

Are there any measurements in your deeds?

lincroft1710

How old is the house? Some old houses do have irregular garden size/shapes.

Bufger

its a 1935 build. if you look on google most gardens in the street are irregular which its only a sneaky suspicion rather than fact.

FF there arent any measurements but it does show the devide of the house and the boundary line running completely off that, if you were to look at it in plan view now it would certainly make a difference. Im not sure how far pictorial evidence goes in this kind of thing though.

G_M

Download your neighbour's Title Pland from the Land Registry (£4) and compare it against your own Plan.

The longer you leave it the more it looks like you accept the status quo so I'd have a friendly chat and try to resolve it earlier rather than wait (years?) for the fence to need replacing.

Do you know who owns the fence? Often hard to tell, but there might be little > signs on the Plan indicating ownership, the Deeds might specify, or talk to others in the street: where there's a line of houses, often each house maintains the fence to the left (or right) and it's the same side for the whole street.

trumpton

In our old house, the neighbours opposite had an extension from the next-door nursery which came across onto their land. Their garden then continued behind this extension. It would have totally put me off buying the house, but the previous owners had sold the nursery a small rectangular chunk of land to extend onto. I am guessing your vendor did the same.

Have you looked on Google Earth? Sometimes the pics are old enough to see before extensions, fences etc.

If the fence was in place when you bought I don't know that you can do anything about it, as presumably the house was 'sold as seen'.

Fire_Fox

If you sell a chunk of land, the information held by the land registry should be amended accordingly. Otherwise you have sold the same piece of land twice.

G_M

If the fence was in place when you bought I don't know that you can do anything about it, as presumably the house was 'sold as seen'.

Wrong. The house was sold as per the Land Registry records.

If the opposite scenario arose (ie the fence extended onto neighbours land giving you extra land) you could not say "It's mine because I bought this land as seen". That's why solicitors/buyers do searches before buying: to check exactly what it is they are buying!

dander

2 ft is quite a lot! How old is the kitchen extension? Are you able to access any of the planning permission paperwork for that? If the extension goes 2 ft into next door's garden there would surely have needed to be some kind of agreement in place to do that, so it might be a way to start investigating what the layout was when that was built. I certainly think if the plans are available that 2 ft is enough to be clearly shown on the plans as to whether the extension was built up to or beyond the boundary.