Helen Crane

And one day he gets a knock on the door from a property developer offering to buy part of it.

for that princely sum of £150,000.

So that's for 200 square metres of his garden, so he is giving up the majority of it.

But for him, he said he'd been struggling to keep up with his mortgage repayments.

They'd gone up in the last few months with all the rate rises, and he could basically use that money to pay off the rest of his mortgage.

So it sounds great for someone who doesn't use their garden, could do with the money.

However, as with any of these things, there are so many...

sort of red flags to be aware of.

I mean, first of all, they could really, really annoy your neighbours.

You know, you have to think about if you're... Because the reason developers want to buy these is to build a house, right?

And they normally want to build something quite big because they obviously want to get the most for the money that they've spent on buying this plot of land.

So, you know, you might lose light from your house, your neighbours might lose light from their house or their gardens, you know,

they might just be annoyed about another car being parked on the street or, you know, more, yeah, more kind of people being around.

So do definitely think about it really carefully.

And obviously, this is the kind of thing that developers want areas that are usually in kind of sort of smart areas or in cities, you know, where land is a premium.

So if you live somewhere else, you might not kind of get...

as much for it and you do want to make sure as well that you're getting a good price for it so we spoke to an estate agent and he said if you do get approached by a developer it's a really good idea to get the land valued independently yourself to check that the price they're offering is a reasonable price because you know 150 000 pounds sounds like loads and loads of money

But actually, you know, if you live in a high value area, what are they going to be able to sell on that house for?

You know, it could be millions.

So I think it's really important to get someone independent in to say, yeah, that offer kind of makes sense and you're not sort of getting ripped off.