South Australia - Boundary and Encroachment

Claims Chronicles

The Background

Settlement of Steve and Sheila Monaghan’s* two-bedroom house in Royal Park, South Australia took place in July 2021. One Saturday afternoon in 2023, completely out of the blue, The Monaghan's heard a knock at their front door. It was their southern-side neighbour, Martin Aspinall, who’d popped over to tell them about a boundary issue. Martin was looking to demolish his property and build a new house from scratch. However, during the planning process, he’d had his property surveyed and discovered that their shared boundary fence was encroaching on his property. He asked the Monaghan's to contribute to the cost of relocating the fence.

What happened next?

In December 2023, the Monaghan's submitted a claim relating to the encroaching fence and subsequently retained their own surveyor to undertake a survey of the property. The survey revealed that, in addition to the encroachment along the southern boundary, the northern and eastern boundary fences are sitting inside the boundary of the Monaghan’s property and they had lost 13.7 sqm of land in total.

What did we do?

In February 2024, the claim was accepted under Covered Risk 4.5 (boundary and encroachment coverage). In order to resolve it, we agreed with the Monaghan's that we’d cover their portion of the fencing relocation cost for the southern boundary and compensate them for the unimproved land value representing the area of land loss from the fence encroachments along the northern and eastern boundaries. We then offered the Monaghan's approximately $15,000 for the combined amount of their total loss to settle the claim. They accepted our offer which means there’ll be no further boundary claims in the future.

Payment: approx. $15,000 | Claim Type: Boundary and encroachment

*Names have been changed for privacy purposes.