It’s way too late now, but you may have had a convincing argument that you already had an easement by necessity or possibly a prescriptive easement.
(1) As other have noted, we don’t know for sure it’s a true double lot, and (2) if it is a true double lot, then it seems to me the fair and elegant solution here (assuming the OP!s home is confined to a single lot) is to make an all or nothing offer: wither the neighbor buys an entire lot’s worth of property (thus switching it up so they have a double lot and the OP has a single lot), or they buy nothing. Of course the OP would also lose the outbuilding in the process, and this would not be practical if the OP’s home does not fit neatly onto a single lot.
Still, cutting a sliver off a lot seems to have the potential of making that lot significantly less desirable and lead to a lot of unknown risk for the OP.
FWIW, I was informed when I purchased my home (built in the 1950s) that my backyard *wall (it’s common for yards to have walls here) was a couple feet onto my neighbor’s property. I have since toyed with the idea, in my mind, of seeing if there might be a way to purchase the land and thus not have that weird “asterisk” to the title. This thread has convinced me that, actually, if it ever becomes a problem (like if/when I’m trying to sell my home, or the neighbor theirs), the most elegant/simple solution would be to simply demolish the wall and put up a new one (or else a fence) and coordinate with the neighbor to the extent needed to do that. Or, if the neighbor will have none of that (refuses to let me demolish my wall on their property) just put up a new wall right on the property line (thus leaving a narrow strip of “no man’s land” that is really just the neighbor’s sliver of property between two walls) and then consider my current wall something like abandoned property.
*And of course my initial thought was, is it really that my wall is on my neighbor’s property, or is it that my neighbor’s wall is further onto their property than it needs to be? Anyway, I’m assuming it’s actually mine based on whatever various permits and records on file with the city say about who built it and when.
That seems like a major hassle to me. Now the OP has to enter into an enduring landlord-tenant relationship… with his neighbor… and if the OP decides to evict his neighbor, the neighbor will still be living right next door?
That may be true in theory, and such was my thinking as well, but then again, if the issue is needing to be able to sell the property (with clear title), it’s possible that the only way to do that would be to first sue the neighbor, go to court, and have a court rule in Mighty_Mouse’s favor. Paying the neighbor for the express easement, getting it in writing, might actually have been cheaper than the lawsuit. Plus, it creates less ill-will with the neighbor.
Otherwise, the purchaser would essentially be buying themselves into having to be the plaintiff in a lawsuit against their neighbor if they ever want to have clear title themselves. Which is not a thing people typically want to do.
We did not. Much legal thought at $450/hour went into the issue before the easement solution was identified as the best way forward.
We had purchased owners title insurance. But we had to hire our own lawyer to get the title insurance company to take the issue seriously.
One day we came home to our neighbor having set up a pile of fence posts and rails next to the driveway. He was threatening to put up a fence across the bottom of our driveway. The police dissuaded him from doing so, since from what they could see, he was trespassing on our property. They told him he’d need a court order, not just a surveyor’s report. One of the responding officers was his brother in law! Until this point, the title company was telling us to ignore the issue because until we were selling it had no impact.
In the end the title insurance company reimbursed us for the cost of the easement, the legal costs of recording it and the second survey. We were out only the cost of our lawyers to convince the title company that the “issue was ripe” (I think that is the legal term they used) and to watch over their lawyer’s behavior, because obviously they wanted this settled as cheaply [to them] as possible and we thought it should be settled so that the damage to our property value from the screwed up “drive by” survey they did was zero or at least minimized.
I’m in Colorado. We owned two adjacent 1 acre lots. We wanted to combine them for tax purposes, and since we knew we where gonna sell, it was gonna be all or nothing (the adjacent lot was pretty much unbuildable)
We had to have it surveyed and re-platted. So, essentially we had our own little subdivision within the bigger subdivison.
I would talk to your town or county planning department. I was a county GIS guy that worked very closely with planning, that’s where I would send anyone with such a question.
The trouble with building your own garage and renting it to the neighbor is that a garage is an accessory structure, and those usually have very different setback requirements than the primary structure. Often they can be a lot closer to property lines, but they often have to be in the rear yard, which may not be the right place in this situation. You’re also often limited in how many accessory structures you have, usually just one or two, and there’s lot coverage restrictions as well, so if you have a gazebo or shed then you may already be out of luck.
You’ve gotten plenty of advice so far, and you just need to do your due diligence on the zoning front. You can talk to the town zoning official to see what sort of red flags they might identify from the get-go, but ultimately you don’t need a realtor, you need an attorney.
Yeah, title insurance companies are notorious for getting out of doing the job you pay them to do. We had a good friend (we kind of drifted away, but unrelated to the discussion) whose family business was a title company, started by her father, I think. She said they hardly ever paid claims.
The house next to my uncle is owned by the bakery opposite; they currently use it as a dormitory for the bakery workers. They wanted to move part of the fence line to improve vehicular access from the front to the back of the property. My uncle agreed, providing they would rebuild the fence (which was very dilapidated) and one or two other things. I said to him that he ought to get all this documented and sell them the land, or it would cause problems when the house was sold. I don’t know if he took my advice (typically, he seldom took anyone’s advice). Now my uncle had died, and we are going to find out whether this was documented or not.
Sounds like the bakery has a problem now.
Maybe, but it sounds like the uncle’s family has a problem, too.
If nothing is documented, Adverse Possession is a real issue.
And whichever side wins, the lawyers (on both sides) will be very happy.
We had an interesting situation when we owned a house in Port Townsend, WA. Our neighbors did some major remodeling that put their new living room just a few feet from their (very old) fence dividing our properties. They had a surveyor out for some reason shortly after and discovered that nine inches of their addition was on our property. Whoever built the fence decades earlier, obviously didn’t hire a surveyor.
We were amiable to selling them the necessary strip of land we didn’t even know we owned for the fair market value of a couple thousand dollars. Despite this, to make it happen, our neighbor had to sue us for adverse possession and we had to hire a lawyer to talk to his lawyer so they could settle on the already agreed fair value plus our legal fees.
How neighborly of them. I hope you never gave them a cup of sugar after that BS!
They didn’t have any choice. Apparently, the only way the transfer was legal was through that mechanism. They could have taken it to court and gotten the land without any compensation.
After looking briefly through Viburnum’s Ordinances, it appears they don’t have a real zoning ordinance with things like minimum setbacks or lot sizes, etc. Consequently, it would seem you’ve nothing more complicated to do than have a survey done, produce legal descriptions for both affected properties, and register/record those with the county. Pretty simple, really,
Yeah, I figured city ordinances would be a nothingburger in this situation, but of course I won’t know for certain until I’ve spoken to … somebody. Not joking: in Viburnum you can leave a rotting deer carcass hanging from your tree until you get around to taking it down. CITE: I saw it happen.
I can see how their lawyer might have advised them to sue for Adverse Possession, but it probably could have been done by a simple lot line adjustment. Still a bit of a hassle, but less $$ for the lawyers.
Yes, but the way it was done settles the adverse possession issue once and for all. With the length of time that had passed with the erroneous usage, that was probably an important consideration. I can understand why it was done that way.
Suing someone because you can’t settle your business withou a lawsuit, even if the other party wants to, seems to be a thing in some other contexts as well. I read once where Sister A was at Sister B’s house, and Sister A’s little boy got into some shenanigans and wound up in the hospital (details don’t matter). Sister B apologized up and down (she was in some way culpable, doesn’t matter how) and she contacted her insurance company about making things right. The insurance company said they wouldn’t do jack shit until they had a lawsuit in their hands. So effectively Sister B was forced (for lack of a better choice of words) to have her Sister A sue her so she could make things right.
I read it as you offered and despite that, they sued. Nevermind then. Odd systems.
I don’t know about your area, but in my county (Placer, CA) there are many properties that have a city address and zip code, but are not in the incorporated area and are actually covered by county building codes and regulations. I’m assuming in all the research you’ve done, you have ascertained that you are within the city limits.