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A guy buys our neighbouring block of units (the whole thing). He immediately sets about refurbishing the block. When he gets to his garden, he decides to remove every tree, including a big camphor laurel tree on the shared fenceline with us (mostly on his side).
He does not contact our strata about his plans, but we get contact from his arborist asking for access on our property during removal of the tree. We oblige. The tree disappears, along with a couple of colorbond fencing panels at either side. It’s left like that for a few weeks. We follow up with the arborist who says the new owner guy is arranging the fencing repair himself.
Some fence builders show up one day soon after and they pull down the rest of the shared fence and start rebuilding it. The next day, a couple of our owners notice they are constructing the new fence 20cm further into our property, drilling post holes into our concrete slab and garden brickwork (it was previously posted in the soil back toward his property). They even cut a row of bricks off the end of our garden wall to accommodate the new fence position. The new owner is on site and our owners question the basis for this new position. He asks in reply if we have a survey that proves the new position is wrong. We don’t but he’s the one moving it, where’s his etc? The conversation gets heated/aggressive and our owner calls the police who promptly attend but can do noting as they don’t know boundary lines either. Police just ask the fence builders to finish up quickly and leave the area tidy. Our strata manager gets the new owner’s phone number from the arborist. When they start talking about the fence issue, the owner hangs up on them and won’t answer further calls (hanging up again and again when they call from different numbers).
We write a letter to the neighbour inviting discussion and de-escalation of tempers. No reply.
We send an official fencing notice proposing a new fence at the original position. No reply.
We apply to NCAT for a fencing order. The neighbour does not turn up. The hearing is adjourned to give him another chance.
Next NCAT hearing and the neighbour does turn up. We’re sent to a room with a mediator. Neighbour denies much of everything and refuses to right it at his expense. We come back to the hearing and the member has found a reason to dismiss our application on a technicality: NCAT can only act in fencing matters where a fence does not yet exist or where a fence is “insufficient” for quality/purpose, as in falling down or with holes/gaps causing security/privacy issues etc, making the fence insufficient as an actual fence. For NCAT jurisdiction, it does not matter that the fence may not be in the right place. The member said a great many fences are not exactly on the boundary line.
Effectively this means that one neighbour can replace an “insufficient” fence with a new one and put it where they like, so long as they complete the fence to a “sufficient” standard before anyone stops them and takes it to NCAT. Once the fence is built it’s out of NCAT’s hands and into the hands of the Land & Environment Court where we would need to run a case for an estimated $25k-$40k, and if successful we might recover $15k-$25k, leaving us down $10k-$20k by the end.
There seems to be no other simple/affordable solution here. Anybody got any thoughts/ideas? Thanks.