In my nearly 18 years of real estate sales, I’ve had some challenging issues that neighbors have brought up during sales. When properties come on the market, neighbors sometimes take the opportunity to air their grievances. That is literally when a neighbor has the most leverage and even the ability to hold up a sale. It’s their last chance to get a situation squared away that may have been festering for years. The following are three examples I’ve worked through in my career.
My first encounter with a squirely neighbor happened in Southern Marin. I was selling a top-level condominium that the owners had only used as a vacation home. They literally only occupied the condo for one to two weeks a year. So, the neighbors below them had it really good 50-51 weeks out of the year. However, my seller had put in a wood floor years before, and wood floors are notorious for amplifying noise from above. That’s why most HOAs, including that one, prohibit wood floors for upper units.
The downstairs neighbor complained to me, so the wood floor suddenly became a disclosure issue. The buyers loved the wood floor and didn’t want to see it go. The solution was the seller had to pay $6,000 to the downstairs neighbor so they could soundproof their ceiling. Ouch! In that case, the squirely neighbor had a legitimate beef and we came to a resolution that worked for everyone.
Not all squirely neighbor complaints are legitimate. Take the case of the neighbor who built a fence a decade before, and my seller didn’t contribute to it. I was selling the property off the market, and the week before closing I bumped into the neighbor and happily told them they would be getting a new neighbor soon. Shortly after I received a threatening letter from the neighbor informing me he was going to sue and stop the sale unless he was reimbursed for half the cost of the fence replacement.
I took the letter to my broker at the time and we looked up the law regarding fence replacements. I forget the exact statute of limitations on the issue, but it was something like 18 months. After that, if one of the neighbors doesn’t pay and the issue isn’t resolved, the one neighbor who footed the whole bill has no recourse. My seller had her own reasons for not paying before and she wasn’t going to pay during the sale. We ignored the neighbor, and he had no basis to file anything against the property so the sale went through the following week despite the squirely neighbor’s threats.
The last example is probably the worst. I was representing a buyer and the neighbor told me it would be my buyer’s responsibility to replace the sump pump in his driveway. His logic was that it was my soon-to-be new buyer’s property that caused the need for the sump pump, because it was needed for water running off the property above. During the course of the escrow we were looking at everything, including improving the drainage. However, when referencing the title report there was a recorded item about the drainage. I had to go down to the Civic Center to pull the original record and found that the two neighbors had agreed to the current drainage configuration, so there had been a final settlement.
I went back to the neighbor and told him what I had found. With the recorded document in hand, I said sorry, but my buyer would not be buying him a sump pump. That wasn’t part of the recorded settlement. Furthermore, I had to advise my buyer not to reconfigure the drainage, otherwise he would likely be opening a can of worms with the neighbor. The neighbor was very unhappy to be confronted with the facts, but I felt a little bit like a private detective who had solved a case.
Sometimes squirely neighbors have legitimate issues. Other times they don’t. Either way, when you go to sell you can expect to hear about them.