I just spoke with the City Assessor, who will be coming out here on City business later this week. He says the value of the land is between $2 and $3 per square foot if you can't build on it.

He too suggested we hire an appraiser to give us a value based on comps.

As for sharing the garden with the neighbours, they have no interest in using any of this common-use patch of land, and no interest in gardening.

Just playing devils advocate here....but if you divide the land, you may value the land at 10K but the loss to your neighbors resale may be 40K.

If I were your neighbor, I would work out some cost share on fencing and then garden with you. I love vegetables and truth be told, those pesky rabbits are tasty too.

Hmmmmm.....

Good luck,

Gary De Pury
Broker-Owner
Bay Vista Realty
Gary@DePury.com
Oh, by the way, I am never too busy for your referrals.

Scott, bingo, thank you, that's exactly what I'll do!

You could just hire an appraiser to give you a value.

>You can't really start estimating what each individual sq. ft would be worth because that's more of a value judgement - what one person may think is valuable, another may think is a piece of junk.

But you'll agree a plot of land where you aren't allowed to build is going to be worth less than a plot of land on which you can build?

Actually, now that you've gone to the Assessor's office, you have a ballpark idea. The rest of the price has to do with you and your neighbor and who is benefitting more from this transaction, in the short term as well as the long term.

Only the two of you will be able to figure that out. You don't want to overpay, but you do want to offer enough to entire your neighbor to sell, right? That's the tradeoff.

Hi DM,
In order to make investing in real estate understandable and actually manageable, you need to judge the land by an average value per square foot. You can't really start estimating what each individual sq. ft would be worth because that's more of a value judgement - what one person may think is valuable, another may think is a piece of junk. You see the area of land you want to use as being unusable, therefore worth less, but another person may see it as a perfect rock-garden space and may see more value in it than you do. Do you see what I mean?
So in order to make a transaction workable, you should stick with the city-assessed value of $29.74/sq ft for any part of the property you want to purchase. Disclaimer: this is only my opinion! :-)

--Tim Cahill

Here's what I found out. The city assessed our land five years ago as being worth $29.74 per square foot, which would mean that the garden would cost $20,000. The neighbours' share of that is half, so we'd be paying $10,000 to buy that back.

But here's the issue with using the assessed value: not every piece of this plot of land is equally valuable, is it? The bit we want is a steep slope with nothing growing on it but a few weeds right now. You can't build a house on it and sell it for hundreds of thousands, the way the rest of the plot has been used. So then what is the true value of this patch?

Thank you both for the quick reply. We hadn't considered the formal aspect of how the city will look on this re-allotment, so thank you for bringing that to our attention. Also, very helpful to check with the assessor's office on how land is evaluated around here.

Leasing would not be an option as the garden would be an extension of our back yard, and contained inside of our fence - which we have yet to build.

Thanks again! I will share here what I learnt after speaking with the City.

Another idea might be to lease the land from your neighbor for the season(s) which you'd like to use it. That way you aren't paying taxes year round for land which might be ungrowable year round. You'd need an attorney to draft some agreement but I'm sure for a nominal expense something could be worked out, either way you'll need an attorney to draft the proper documents to purchase the land outright or to lease. You'd probably have to check with zoning & inspectional services to make sure both properties would remain conforming lots, sometimes even the loss of 10 sq./ft can make a lot non-conforming. Then you would have to go down the variance route. Also would the addition be worth it to future buyers? What if you decide in 5-10 years you don't want to continue gardening? Explore the lease option for a few years and see how things go...

Just my opinion, hope that helps,

Have you confirmed with Somerville building Inspections that they would approve this re-allotment of land and the subsequent re-arrangement of property?

That said ... it depends on where in Somerville your property is ... you can then take a look at how land is assessed (go to city hall) for the properties around you and break it down into value per sf and then you'd have a pretty good basis for how much this additional 672 sf should be worth.

Feel free to contact me at greer.swiston@commonmoves.com if you don't want to share the specifics of your private information on such a public forum and I'd be happy to see if I can help!