Buying a piece of neighbours garden (sort of)

ohdarn

Hello, I have a question that I can't seem to find the answer to through a Google search.

Last year we bought a house. Our house is similar in design to next doors and originally the two houses had similar length gardens.

At some point in the past the previous owner of our property sold a bit of the end of our garden to next door. So theirs is now an L shape.

Now, when I say sold, it's actually a 99 year lease.

The neighbor put a nice greenhouse on it.

The next door neighbour that bought/leased the garden no longer lives there, instead they rent it out and they live in Thailand.

The tenants of the house do not use the end of their garden except for using the greenhouse to store all their excess rubbish in it. When I mean rubbish, I mean literal rubbish.

We'd like to reclaim this bit of garden if it's possible but we've no idea how. We could offer to buy it back but how would we buy back something we've leased?

This part of the garden still shows up on our deeds as ours but it is registered as being leased out to next door, there's a little red box on the register that shows the particular area of land.

Thanks for any help.

Browntoa

You need agreement from the next door neighbour to terminate the lease. They may play nice and do it for free but they could also ask for compensation. 

You could sweeten the deal by offering to move the fence line back to it's original position and clear the greenhouse at your expense .

There will be legal costs involved 

JReacher1

I think you’ll have to offer a lot of money to make the neighbour sell it back to you. Although the tenants may not currently use it the bigger garden adds value to the property so there is no real benefit for the neighbour to give you this land back unless it’s worth their while. 

user1977

Browntoa said:

You need agreement from the next door neighbour to terminate the lease. They may play nice and do it for free but they could also ask for compensation. 

You could sweeten the deal by offering to move the fence line back to it's original position and clear the greenhouse at your expense .

There will be legal costs involved 

I wouldn’t be hopeful about them giving the land away, there’ll almost certainly be a price involved.

Neighbour is likely to want their legal costs covered, and if they (and/or the OP) has a mortgage, that’ll involve additional costs/complications.

silvercar

I doubt the neighbours would be in a position to sell you something that is currently subject to a tenancy agreement. Your renting neighbours have a right to use that land as part of their tenancy agreement, their landlord can't easily remove part of their tenancy. Sounds like the neighbours have a use for it, even if it is just for storing their rubbish.

ohdarn

Browntoa said:

You need agreement from the next door neighbour to terminate the lease. They may play nice and do it for free but they could also ask for compensation. 

You could sweeten the deal by offering to move the fence line back to it's original position and clear the greenhouse at your expense .

There will be legal costs involved 

Thanks, getting hold of the landlord might prove to be the tricky part.

The concrete fence posts for the original boundary line are still in place, it'd only need fence panels sliding back in.

Are there certain legal experts I should look up for this or are standard conveyancers adequate do you know?

ohdarn

user1977 said:

Browntoa said:

You need agreement from the next door neighbour to terminate the lease. They may play nice and do it for free but they could also ask for compensation. 

You could sweeten the deal by offering to move the fence line back to it's original position and clear the greenhouse at your expense .

There will be legal costs involved 

I wouldn’t be hopeful about them giving the land away, there’ll almost certainly be a price involved.

Neighbour is likely to want their legal costs covered, and if they (and/or the OP) has a mortgage, that’ll involve additional costs/complications.

Yes I've no doubt they'll want a substantial amount of money for it.

I've just no idea how to go about it as everything I found online related to buying a piece of land from someone else, I didn't know if the lease portion of this prior agreement changed the way it would be approached.

ohdarn

silvercar said:

I doubt the neighbours would be in a position to sell you something that is currently subject to a tenancy agreement. Your renting neighbours have a right to use that land as part of their tenancy agreement, their landlord can't easily remove part of their tenancy. Sounds like the neighbours have a use for it, even if it is just for storing their rubbish.

This assumes they have a tenancy agreement 😁 
The house seems to falling down around the poor people that live in it, I'm not sure the landlord cares about them enough to draw one up.

Soot2006

how long is left on the lease?

user1977

ohdarn said:

Browntoa said:

You need agreement from the next door neighbour to terminate the lease. They may play nice and do it for free but they could also ask for compensation. 

You could sweeten the deal by offering to move the fence line back to it's original position and clear the greenhouse at your expense .

There will be legal costs involved 

Are there certain legal experts I should look up for this or are standard conveyancers adequate do you know?

It's just standard conveyancing. I mean, it's not a normal purchase, so it doesn't fit on the usual production line, but there's nothing complex about it.

ThisIsWeird

Are there any conditions/restrictions/covenants written in to this lease doc?