Shared access and drive

Mojisola

bluedrop wrote: »

Yes - parking areas are clearly marked. But house A can only be accessed through the gate. The gate is right in front of house B .

Is there no way at all of making another driveway or widening the existing one to make two separate access points?

bluedrop

Please see the house(s) layout here:

https://ibb.co/hGUzRa

bluedrop

pinkshoes wrote: »

Is there sufficient visitor parking?

That's a good point. Double yellow line all along the road outside!

Tom99

[FONT=Tahoma, sans-serif]I once owned a house with a shared drive access. I owned the drive and my neighbour had a right of way over it. The neighbouring house was owned by an old lady.

[/FONT] [FONT=Tahoma, sans-serif]Within a month the old lady moved and my new neighbour rented out his house to two lads who owned two cars and they were always blocking my access.

[/FONT] [FONT=Tahoma, sans-serif]If you really like the house you need to look at the title plans before you put in any offer. Exactly which area of land is owned by each house and exactly which areas of land are the subject of a right of way. Also the exact terms of that right of way.[/FONT]

pinkshoes

Having seen the layout, then NO WAY!!

By the looks of it, house A only gets 2 parking spaces, and house B just one space.

Where are visitors meant to park???? As there is no street parking and double yellow, this immediately implies there would be parking issues.

I would certainly not purchase this.

Mickygg

Nah I wouldn't. It's the possible issues that could arise such as problem parking, blocking in etc.

What if you fall out with your neighbour or they fall out with you? A shared drive has the potential for issues and then not wanting to live there if issues do arise.

Yen there is the wear and tear to consider.

Nope not me.

ProDave

Personally I would want to make my own access. I will guess that they used the shared access to make planning easier. If you seek a new access it would have to comply with current visibility distance requirements which it may not be able to do, so I suspect they took the easy option.

The problem I see is when someone comes to visit house B, and is not aware of the situation they could block your access.

kerri_gt

We have a house with a shared drive between us / next door that leads to an individual parking space / garage for each house (most in the street are built like this) and to date we haven't had any significant issues - in fact, we've prob been the annoying party as we needed to take up both spaces to have work done in the garden (there is parking for 1 car per house to the back of the property but the access between the houses is 1 car wide) Neighbours were really understanding about this even with the work taking longer.

There are additional parking bays for residents with more than 1 car per house / visitors in the street although this isn't always 100% sufficient so there are times when it's a little like wacky races - but in the main people are mindful of driveways / access.

Although it's not necessarily ideal (there's not a great amount of room for 2 cars, plus wheelie bins etc) and you wouldn't get two BMW X5 up there - it certainly wasn't a significant issue for us when buying the house - we saw plenty of houses with worse parking situations. The key thing is that you need to get on with your neighbours and communicate.

goodwithsaving

I had a great experience with a shared driveway but I had brilliant neighbours. When we went away we looked after each others property, brought up each others bins, parked on each others drives etc. Never had a problem.
I wouldn't be put off, I'd just check out the neighbours first. That said, I wouldn't have it like on a new build estate where drives (i.e very small parking bay on side of house) are very narrow and next to each other - I walk past a few on a daily basis where the neighbour parks so badly that the other side can't get their car on their own drive.

zagubov

First house we bought was a semi in a nice suburb where driveways/garages were as rare as hens' teeth. But our house had a shared drive and a garage.

Catch was, our neighbour rented out to students who occasionally left their car in the drive. With having kids we didn't have the energy to deal with them

Luckily later on we sold to a bloke who would clearly have dealt with them the way a full stop deals with a sentence. :beer: