Dan
Welcome to Sound Business Insights. I’m Dan Watkins. This episode’s about neighbor disputes. This podcast is not intended to provide legal advice
Neil
So a subset of real estate disputes, if you will, involves neighbors. Dan, being a neighbor is a challenging thing for many people, and good fences make good neighbors. But let’s talk about the types of disputes that neighbors get into, and just a quick brush on what they might need to know. And let’s start with boundary issues, because I think boundary issues are different than just a disagreement between neighbors or how they’re treating one another. These can be very serious issues. What is a boundary issue and is that an area where they really need the advice and counsel of an attorney?
Dan
Boundary disputes range from an old fence that fell over and someone put it back up. People acting as their own fence contractors and not using a surveyor or soil subsidence. You take out an old retaining wall, you put in something that’s rots away, and all of a sudden your land is now on the neighbor’s land and the big rain comes, and all of a sudden everybody’s fighting and arguing.
Someone gets an estimate and no one wants to believe how much it’s going to cost, and then they fight. And then you have trouble having resolutions. Hard words are spoken, feelings are hurt, and everybody digs their heels in and they would rather pay their lawyer billions of dollars than be reasonable. So we get a lot of those, or we try to help them resolve them, I’d say 90% of the time. But sometimes there’s real legitimate disputes that you have to fight for and boundary disputes, building fence across the line, building a building, a storage shed, whatever. Putting a driveway across your neighbor’s land. There’s a lot of ways that you can really get into an area where you have to defend your property. You got a million dollar property, 10,000 square foot lot doesn’t take a rocket scientist to talk about how much per square foot you got.
That’s right. It’s a very expensive piece of land now. And somebody just taking a couple feet here, shaving it off, adds up to a couple hundred feet over the entire property line. And then you have a messed up title. Then you have, you’re messing up your obligations to your lender. It spirals out of control. All the problems when people don’t face reality, fix the boundary line problem and follow the law.
Neil
But this is an area where they need an attorney…
Dan
sad to say. Yeah.
Neil
So another common issue that is a boundary issue is a fence in California. It takes a unique kind of approach to a fence. What’s the general rule when there’s a fence between neighbors ?
Dan
that’s on the property line? Community fence. Yes. Common area fence, not common area. Both have an obligation to maintain and pay for share, basically share the expense of maintaining this fence and which is sometimes neighbors are great and sometimes neighbors are terrible about it.
Yes. And they have different opinions and different motivations too. Yes. A very common form of neighbor issue is negligence. And we had an issue where changes to a property above uphill basically cause soil erosion and a huge issue for our client who was downhill. So talk a little bit about negligence, Dan and the types of cases we get involved in. There are duties when you own a piece of property and that is sometimes not followed. You have a duty to get your water to the street, not through the neighbor’s house, into their living room. I know the water falls from the sky and it’s not your fault, but you have a duty on your property to get your water from the back to the front. You also have a duty to not disrupt people’s quiet enjoyment. Yes. Right. You have a duty to not have noxious fumes fill in the air.
You got a duty to control your kids and not have vandals all over the place. And animals. And animals. And sometimes people’s sense of what’s normal and fair and reasonable is different than their neighbors. You got one neighbor that’s super quiet and finicky and you got another neighbor that’s fun and large, Finn and yeah, live and large. So those personalities hit and they don’t get along. We try to get ’em to do alternative dispute resolution and other forms before they spend a bunch of money on us. We do try these cases. We do go to court and we’re successful, but before we get to that point, we always try to get them to see a cheaper, quicker, more reasonable way out until we all agree that this is no use.
Neil
It’s no use. So do we coach neighbors, Dan? Do we coach our clients on how to have a crucial conversation on their own?
Dan
Yes, I’ve resolved hundreds of disputes this way over the years. I will ghost write an email. I will ghost write because you don’t want to say my lawyer. Then everybody gets scared. But I will ghost write coach and do everything I can to get my clients out of a neighbor dispute without involving lawyers. And there are good C community resources. Yes, there are that are there. And a lot of them are little to no cost. Yes, some are free. They’re designed to resolve neighbor disputes and leave some ground standing perhaps between the parties. Yeah, they work. They don’t always work, but it’s free. And it’s a program really encouraged by the superior of court. And we actually like cases if we’re going to have to go to court that have gone through that process, I think you get a favorable eye from the judge when you say, well, we did go to community mediation and we just couldn’t get it to work.
That’s why we’re here. They feel more inclined to try to step in and find out who really is the bad guy.
Neil
Another really common real estate related, neighbor related issue is a view dispute. Dan, that tree’s blocking my view. This, it’s a $10 million view and your tree’s blocking my view. What does the law have to say about that?
Dan
The law is fickle. Some situations, the law says no, you can’t block that view. In some situations it says yes you can. And after doing this a long time, in some areas there are no view corridors. In some areas there are some. It goes down to community, down to CC NR down to title reports, down to local municipality ordinance. Yes. So when you have one of those situations, I can’t tell you right now, no, you don’t have a right to block someone’s view or Yes, you do.
It is all different in every location. It’s unique. It’s unique. So yeah, those are one of the situations where call your lawyer and see if they can give you a straight answer and determine if you have rights or don’t. And if you don’t, then that’s the way it goes. And before you buy, call your lawyer or check with your title officer and see if there’s any restrictions or any situation where somebody, this is a big one. People buy a house, they’ve had it for a while, then the neighbor decides to put a second story in and their 10 year view just goes away and they’re like, I didn’t know. So before you buy, check it out to see if anyone’s going to build it in front of you.
Neil
And on that note, Dan, there should also be a word of caution, which is don’t take this into your own hands. How expensive is it to replace a tree that you cut down in anger in San Diego?
Dan
Treble damages. It’s terrible. They had to pass a law to stop it because people just get their chainsaw and say, I can fix this. No problem. And boom. Yeah, it’s frustrating because if a branch is hanging over your property, yes, technically you should be able to cut that. But if you kill the tree, how do you know what was really hanging tree? Yeah. If you killed the tree, how do you know is really hanging over there in trees, mature trees to replace very expensive
Neil
$30,000?
Dan
Yeah. Plus the damages and treble and attorney’s fees. It can turn into a silly tree. It can turn into a big problem.
Yes. Now, when we handle situations like that, if we can’t resolve it, then we understand a lot of strategy when it comes to winning that kind of case. We use every resource. Our client has sometimes an insurance policy that’ll cover certain things. Sometimes they’ll have statute of limitations issue they can rely on. We know the laws and the rules and different jurisdictions and locations and neighborhoods. So yeah, when we go play hardball, we play hardball.
Neil
Two other things I’d like to ask you about, Dan, nuisance issues. If a neighbor has one loud party that’s not going to, they’re not even going to answer the call. If it’s multiple, then we’ve got an issue. How do you approach questions of nuisances and what does our audience need to know about?
Dan
Generally speaking, what is a nuisance? Nuisance are just that denying people’s quiet enjoyment of their property.
Now, actionable nuisance when it happens more than once. A noise complaint. We see this a lot. People complaining about Airbnbs and La Jolla. There’s just a murder at an Airbnb party or a bunch of people rented a big place, Airbnb supposedly, and the other ones are trying to crack down on that, but it still happens. And then you living next door and you got to have the party house. But then again, you’re the owner, you don’t even know what’s happening. The agents and local people that manage a property aren’t telling you because they don’t want to lose the revenue. It’s a very complicated question. It happens. We actually handle those kinds of cases. We have gone to trial on those issues and know the law very well, and we like to see those things come to our office. ASAP, if you own a property that’s having a complaint that’s on an Airbnb or VRBO, let us know right away so we can, because what happens is they bring an action for A TRO, yes, restraining order, and it’s just an evidentiary hearing and you don’t go with your lawyer and then a bunch of evidence comes in the wrong way and you’re the owner of the property and you didn’t know that maybe you should have had a lawyer because we would’ve taken on that matter completely different than any homeowner would, and we would’ve framed it right from the get go.
I’m not saying we’re a cure for everything. Sometimes you got just one of those terrible neighbors. It’s just never going to let it go. So you just got to go to court.
Neil
Another fact of life of living in San Diego, Dan is solar. There are more solar disputes with more solar companies. That’s not the issue that we can help with. But if there’s damage to a roof or a fire, when is it that we can help people to have issues with their solar companies versus those that may just be a contract dispute between players?
Dan
We handle a lot of solar complaints against solar companies, and there’s a certain way to do it, and there’s a wrong way to do it, in my opinion. The right way is hire us, talk to us, and then don’t have us charge you anything until we get an expert opinion about the quality of that construction.
For your solar panels, what’s going on out there is these large solar companies are just hiring fly by night. Companies with crews who don’t have workers’ compensation insurance are being paid under the table and they get paid per piece installed. And so they’re just drilling holes all over people’s roofs and they’re hitting the road because even if they get sued later on, that company’s no longer going to be there. And then the solar company acts like, well, hey, it’s not our fault. They knew exactly what they’re doing and they’re slapping these communities. If you’re going to get solar, ask if it’s really a crew that they work with all the time that you can confirm is not a per piece type of installation. Those things are bad and they cause tons of damage. They put ’em in terrible places like they don’t belong there facing the wrong direction under a tree.
They do everything. They just tell you lies to get it on your roof and it leaks. And then there’s no one there to help you and it doesn’t work or perform. And you have paid good money. And even if you go to court, you have no one to go sue because they’re trying to insulate themselves between the solar company and a third party vendor that does the installation.
Neil
So when is it that a client should call the Watkins firm when they’re facing an issue with solar, when they have any kind of question about whether they’re getting, they have a defective solar panel or set up or there’s a roof leak?
Dan
Yeah. And we will either work with whoever you have as a second opinion or we’ll steer you in a direction that you can decide who you want to hire as your expert to go out there and tell you whether from a legal point of view, the standard of care has been breached.
Now, once you have an expert that says the standard of care has been breached and this is how much it’s going to cost repair, then take the leash off, let the dogs go. We’ll go get your money and have it all taken care of because you shouldn’t have to put up with that. And so yeah, we handle those. A lot of them are not claims because they haven’t seen an expert witness to say, no, this is normal, or Yeah, this is not a problem. Or just having another contractor come out there just turns you into a much more powerful consumer.
Neil
Can you give us some examples of the types of real estate disputes that we get involved in fairly regularly?
Dan
Neighbor disputes, lots of neighbor disputes. We get involved in property line disputes, construction defect, failure to disclose. That happens a lot. And we always take all those types of cases in reverse order.
We look at the damages first, and if the damages are enough to warrant going to the next level, then we will advise to do so. But if the damages are minimal, then we don’t want to waste our client’s money and time. If there’s damages that you’ve suffered, then there’s a law there for you that’ll get your money back. So that’s the first thing you look at. Go get an expert, find out what it’s going to take to fix. Don’t worry about what the contract says or what. So-and-so says, if you have damages, then you want to take that information to your lawyer and they will find a deep pocket out there for you if they can to get you made whole.
Neil
Thank you, Dan.
Dan
Thank you. You can learn more about the Watkins firm at
https://watkinsfirm.com or call our office at (858) 535-1511.