Advice on neighbour wanting to buy some land from my garden

louisehj

Hi,

I am looking for some advice as per the title of the thread lol. Basically I have a small strip of my garden which my neighbour wants to buy to extend their garden when they have an extension built. I would be happy to sell it but dont know anything at all about how its done.

Obv I want to go down the correct route so theres no probs if I sell the house in the future, we both own our houses.

Any advice pls?

Thanks
Louise

DVardysShadow

Buyer should pay all costs to you. You need to consult with your mortgage lender and get their agreement. Then you engage a solicitor to attend to the sale.

Be aware that if you do sell any land, this may devalue the property which may in turn cause you problems with remortgaging if your LTV is currently high - but if the price compensates for this and you put it to the mortgage, this will not be a problem, but you don't get to see a nice little cash pile.

louisehj

Hi, thanks for the advice. House was last valued at 75000 and mortgage is 53000. Its a small strip of land which backs onto my brick shed, its a very small part of the garden as we are an end house about 3m x 1.5m.

DVardysShadow

You should be fine to do it then. Contact your lender first and when you negotiate with the neighbour, negotiate a price plus your costs, eg '£2000 plus costs', don't just negotiate a price and take the costs out of that.

ciano125

DVardysShadow wrote: »

Buyer should pay all costs to you.

As long as you can negotiate this, there is no hard and fast rule that says that they must, but obviously you're not going to leave yourself out of pocket, so if that means paying for your own legal fees but charging more for the land, then so be it.

DVardysShadow

ciano125 wrote: »

As long as you can negotiate this, there is no hard and fast rule that says that they must, but obviously you're not going to leave yourself out of pocket, so if that means paying for your own legal fees but charging more for the land, then so be it.

For a trivial piece of land, the costs will dwarf the value of the land - and costs can increase unexpectedly. So it is only sensible to negotiate on the basis that the buyer pays the seller's costs, rather than risk ending up out of pocket. It is a hard and fast rule that the buyer pays the seller's costs if the seller decides this is the deal.