Affidavit and Insurance Policy?

sheramber

My sister has a strip of land at the bottom of her front garden that doesn't belong to her. It is adjacent to the pavement.

IT is a service strip for cables etc but grassed the same as the garden and she cuts it rather than have an untended bit at the end of her garden.

There is no fence separating it off but the fence between her and semi detached next door stops at the start of that strip.

She had to advise her new neighbour who thought it was part of their front garden.

Did your parents buy the house from new?

Could a fence have been removed years ago.?

tyllwyd

Is this strip of land next to the road? When we bought a new build house about 20 years ago, the land next to the road through the estate was the highway verge, which was due to be taken over by the council when they adopted the road but there was nothing physical separating the verge from the front lawns. (The problem we had was that the road to access the group of three houses where we lived crossed this verge, but it turned out that that first bit of the drive was still owned by the developer with no official right of way for us to use it.)

davidmcn

SimonR34 wrote: »

A bit sh*tty giving a house a garden and then saying you don't own it all, but hey, cut the grass, plant the flowers, we don't care.

Your parents would (or should) have been told by their solicitor when they bought what they were actually buying. Your OP suggested you didn't know what the background was to why this additional area seems to have been incorporated into their garden - are you sure they didn't just deliberately decide to start "looking after" it?

Just never heard of it before.

Well, why would you, unless you regularly bought or sold property? Other people here have heard about similar situations, as have your solicitors, who have given you advice about how to sort it out.

We are not trying to sell any extra land!

Buyers generally expect to get all the property they viewed - not just some of it. Unless you made clear at the outset that you don't own the land and had no intention of doing anything about it, I would expect any buyer to want it sorted out one way or another.

What's the fuss about anyway? It sounds like you wouldn't have a problem declaring in an affidavit that your parents have occupied the land for x years and there's never been a dispute. The insurance cost is trivial in the grand scheme of things.

The alternative is to tell the buyers you're not doing anything about it, in which case they might knock a chunk off the price, and (assuming they're buying with a mortgage) would probably have to get a second opinion from the surveyor about whether it affects the value. The money-saving option is to do what's been recommended.