Rental Property Investor · TX · Member since 2019 · 236 posts · 392 votes
Anyone dealt with this? I had this fence replaced with the previous owner 6 years ago and there was nothing wrong with the fence as of this year. My tenants came home one day and all of a sudden there was a new fence where the old one had been (on the property line on one side). This neighbor replaced their entire fence on all sides without asking any of the neighboring owners and is now reaching out to property owners on each side asking for money. What are your thoughts on this? The previous fence didn't even need small repairs. This is not budgeted for this property and I am livid that they never reached out to the tenants to contact me. If they had asked ahead of time I would have said no... as there was nothing wrong with the original. Thoughts? If they sue in small claims, I am willing to fight. I told them I would pay for repairs in the future on this fence, but I would not have agreed to a new fence.
I replaced my fence back in 2018. I have 3 neighbors and we all communicated on the time frame, materials, vendor and price.
At the end only 2 of the neighbors want to go halves with me.
I think in your case, if your neighbor did not communicate the project with you, I’d try and explain that to them and find out why all of a sudden they want $$.
There got to be something deeper than this situation.
...a little more info... I believe they wanted a matching nice stained fence on all sides of their property and took it upon themselves to have it done without anyone's consent (they are surrounded by rental properties and the previous fences on all sides were not stained). The strange thing is that come to find out, this is the same owner that I reached out to 6 years ago to have the fence replaced after it was falling apart... and so we had an established communication channel and worked together in the past to split the cost. Not sure why they didn't reach out to me ahead of time this time. Anyways, I've told them that I would pay for repairs in the future on this new fence, but I am not paying for this new fence which was completely unnecessary.