Video Summary

Am I allowed to trim my neighbor’s tree that hangs over the property line? The answer to the question is yes, you own from your property line to the center of the earth to the heavens, and so if your neighbor’s limbs or tree hangs over your property line, well, yes you can. Now the only caveat to that is that you can’t go over on his property to do the trimming, because that would be trespassing, but as long as you can trim it in your side of the fence, or your side of the property line, well, that works just fine. The question I get most of the time, however, is not that whether or not you can trim the tree, is whether or not you can make your neighbor trim his tree that’s hanging over your property line and dropping leaves or pine needles, or debris on your pool enclosure, or on your lot, or gets overgrown, and is sort of impairing your use of your property?

I have a standard response to either of these questions, which sometimes begs the question is, is I suggest you maybe talk to your neighbor about it, and ask him if he wouldn’t mind trimming the tree, or taking care of this, because of your problem. Well, usually when I give that sage advice is, “I’ve been there and done that. Unfortunately the neighbor is not very receptive,” and I clean that up substantially, as far as that suggestion is concerned, and has pretty well told me to take a long walk off a short pier, and so we don’t, we’re not making much progress. I tell them, “Well, you’re not in a position to do much other than take care of the problem yourself.” If they had bushes or whatever, you might let them know that whenever you do the trimming, it isn’t pretty, so that they just need to be aware.

If they want to take care of it, fine, but if you have to do it at your expense, well, it’s going to be fairly efficient as far as that concern. They say, “Well, can I sue him or whatever?” The answer to that is is, “Well, yes, but that’s not a very practical remedy, and that landscape guys are a lot cheaper than lawyers, so you could possibly sue your neighbor for nuisance if this continues to drop debris on your side of the property, but by the time you got done doing that with the lawyer, well, you could have probably had a lifetime of maintenance as far as cleaning the property up, and taking care of a matter yourself.”

One other thing as far as trees are concerned is what happens if your neighbor has a tree on his property, storm comes along, blows the tree over onto your property, or it blows it over on your house, or damages your property? Is the neighbor liable? The answer is no, he isn’t liable because it’s an act of God, and so you have to rely upon your own insurance, and oh, by the way, the insurance company isn’t going to pay to have a two year old oak tree hauled out of your back yard, so it’s always good to have good relationship with your neighbor, if that’s at all possible. Now there is an exception to the tree blowing over, is if the tree is diseased or it’s rotted or decayed, you need to put your neighbor on notice if he’s not taking care of matters.

Let him know that he’s being negligent and not maintaining the tree, and if it does blow over on your property, that he will be responsible for your damages, so you would have a cause of action against him for your expenses, which would probably in small claims, up to $5,000, but you should send him a little letter or a notice that’s saying, “Look, you need to take care of that tree. It’s dead. We have a bad windstorm, I’m concerned it’ll blow over on my property, and damage my house, or cause me to have to clean up, and so we’ll look to you to take care of the matter.” Hopefully, you don’t have any problems with your neighbor. Probably you don’t have a good legal solution, but if you do have some questions about real property, give me a call at 727-847-2288.

Video Summary

Do I have to get my neighbors permission to erect the fence where there is already one? Well, that sound like a simple enough question. First off is you need to figure out where your boundary line is. If your neighbors fence is on his property or even if it’s on your property, well, you can put up a fence and you can put it back to back with his and you don’t have to ask his permission.

It’s really not a matter of asking the client, the neighbors permission and that you can put fences up on your property and around them back to back. In fact, I’ve seen that whenever a neighbor has a fence up, but it has been somewhat neglected over the years and is not very sightly, so you may then want to erect a more opaque fence, such as one of this new vinyl fences and you can run them back to back with your neighbors fence. The big thing is, you need to put your fence on your property.

If your neighbors fence is on your property, you can explain to them or send them a little letter with the survey showing that their fence is encroaching upon yours and ask them to please move their fence since it’s on your property or work with the neighbor as far as erecting your new fence and suggest that it’s not a problem if he wishes to tie into it. Depending on what the circumstance is as to how you work that out, but the answer to the questions is you don’t need to ask your neighbors permission to put up a fence as long as it’s on your property.

One cautionary note here is that you need to check your home, your restrictive covenants, in your homeowners association restrictive covenants and that they may restrict whether or not you can construct the fence and you may need to get their permission to put up a fence, whether it’s on your property. That’s something that you might want to check on before you do that.

Also, I think that you’re supposed to whenever you do a fence, there’s a finish side and a an unfinished side. The finished side is supposed to face your neighbor, with the unfinished side facing your side. However, that’s your wood fences versus the new vinyl ones, which don’t have an ugly side. Unless they hadn’t been pressure washed in a long time. That might be on both sides. The other sane thing is as far as maintaining it, you need to get your neighbors permission if you do need to do maintenance to go on to his property.

If you have a problem with fences or whatever, well, I’ll be glad to chat with you about it. Give me a call at 727-847-2288.

Video Summary

How can I stop my neighbor from letting their dog use my yard as a bathroom? Well, I’m afraid I don’t have very good answers for that. I don’t think you really have a viable legal question, and there’s not always a legal answer to a problem. Technically, the dog or the neighbor allowing the dog to come onto your property could be considered trespass, but that’s going to be tough. You don’t want to go to court over a trespass case as far as a dog’s concerned, and then also them not being a good neighbor and policing up after the dog, which probably you wouldn’t mind so much as long as they policed up after the dog.

It falls into one of those categories where it’s just not very considerate, I guess bad manners or whatever, and so you just might suggest, if you see the neighbor, just ask them if you, “Please police up after your dog.” Of course, you may not see it. You just see the results of the latest walk rather than see them right in the actual act or not. There really isn’t a good legal answer to that, and just something that people should be more considerate of their neighbors and police up after their dogs as far as that’s concerned.

I always try whenever we have a problem such as this, is talk about practical solutions to it. I don’t know if you could put up a small picket fence or something, a decorative picket fence in the front. I don’t know if you have a sidewalk or whatever to keep just a decorative small fence, and hopefully the neighbor wouldn’t have the dog jump a small one-foot decorative fence or whatever, as far as that’s concerned. I really don’t have a legal solution to that.

Unfortunately, I don’t think we have a wise enough man since King Solomon to come up with the answer to that problem, a solution, but the only thing I could suggest is if you see them out there, suggest they don’t do it, which is very difficult, or maybe put up some kind of little decorative fence just as a practical matter, make it a little more inconvenient so that the dog would not be so inclined to use your property, but he moves next door and uses your neighbor’s property for whatever uses he needs to take or whatever urges come upon him during his neighbor’s walk.

Of course, if they’re not even walking him and they’re just running wild, well, I guess you can call animal control to say that they’ve got an unleashed dog, but again, that’s not real practical since animal control by the time they get out there the dog’s gone and there’s not a lot you can do about it. I’m willing to talk to you, but I don’t have any answer. You can call and talk to me about the neighbor’s dog at 727-847-2288.