u/Catgutt

Hi folks. This is a follow-up to ‘Neighbor had no idea where the property lines are, and cut down my healthy 89-year-old oak because he didn't like trees being near his shed’, which unexpectedly blew up on this sub. The tl;dr is that in July 2024, a careless neighbor trespassed into my property to cut down a nearly hundred year old healthy oak. He did this because he felt it threatened his shed (it didn’t) and he had no idea where the property lines were and didn’t bother to check, then demanded we split the $2,000 he paid to have it cut down. A lot of people requested follow-up, but I wanted to wait until the situation was fully resolved, which ended up taking a lot longer than anticipated.

My wife and I were both pretty upset about the situation and hit the ground running from day 1. We retained a lawyer specializing in tree law, who advised we solicit a property survey to confirm the location of the tree. This ended up taking nearly two months due to a local shortage of surveyors, and unsurprisingly conclusively demonstrated that the tree was well within the bounds of our property by about fifty feet.

While waiting on that, we hired a TPAQ-certified arborist to examine the stump and photos we provided of the tree pre-cutting. His appraisal was that the tree was healthy at the time of cutting, and assessed a replacement value based on Trunk Formula Technique at $11.8K.

However, in my state the replacement value is not considered the basis for damages. Instead, damages for commercially grown trees are three times the value of the lumber, while for residential trees the recognized damages are the reduction in property value as a result of the trespass. Our lawyer provided a recommendation for a home appraiser to determine this value.

I explored a few other possibilities based on my research and suggestions on this sub. In no particular order:

• We filed a police report, but since it was not a malicious act, they simply dismissed it as a civil matter.
• Our homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover trees on the property, so filing a claim with them was off the table.
• Our mortgage lender was unconcerned with the reduction in value of the property.
• Our neighbor’s homeowner’s insurance wouldn’t cover him, since it was a deliberate (if negligent) act.
• Legal precedent would not support going after the tree service for damages either, since it was our neighbor who engaged their services.
• The fees involved in the survey, arborist appraisal, home appraisal, and lawyer’s fees would not be recoverable. The only damages we could seek would be that loss in property value.

Which just left suing our neighbor for the reduction in property value. By November 2024 we had an appraisal in hand, asserting a loss in value of about $10K. Our lawyer wrote and sent a demand letter, which received no immediate response. After repeated attempts at follow up, and seeing my neighbor walking around his property with a surveyor (now he cares where the property line is), we finally got a response from our neighbor’s lawyer in February 2025.

The response basically asserted that the tree was dead and ‘hollowed out’, that it was on some forgotten corner of the property and therefore worthless, and that it was an innocent mistake by my neighbor so oopsie-daisy not his problem.

This pissed me off.

My lawyer thought this response indicated that my neighbor’s lawyer recognized he had no case, so called him to see if they could hash things out over the phone. Neighbor’s lawyer was apparently dismissive, clearly out of his element with tree law (it seems his specialty is tenant law), and hung up on my lawyer.

This made my lawyer rather upset, and consequently highly motivated to pursue the case further as a matter of defending his professional integrity. As general life advice I would highly recommend not antagonizing lawyers.

So, my lawyer sent a follow-up letter breaking down every point of the defense and why it’s nonsense, and included the arborist appraisal and photos that I took the day-of, which clearly showed that the tree was healthy and that the claim that it was dead and hollow was bullshit.

My neighbor, and his lawyer, didn’t reply. So at this point- nearly a year after the actual incident- we finally filed a lawsuit. And this… still didn’t seem to spur my neighbor into taking it any more seriously.

The court system did its thing, slow as ever, and by fall assigned us a court date for summer 2026. Then there was a whole lot of radio silence until lo and behold, come February, my neighbor must have realized that he was actually going to court for a lawsuit he was unlikely to win. Suddenly he wanted to negotiate, offering a very generous $2K.

Hah hah lol no. We began actual negotiation and the number started to rise. Apparently, my neighbor was yelling at his lawyer by this point. Eventually, we settled on $7K. I was a bit disappointed by this, but my lawyer gently explained that going to court would mean more billable hours, plus having to pay for the time of our expert witnesses (surveyor, arborist, and appraiser), plus any additional fees that would go into actually extracting the money from this moron if/when we won, and those would eat up the difference even assuming the judge fully sided with us.

At this point our total expenses were just under $5K out of pocket, so we would still come out ahead. There was some additional nonsense with our neighbor asking to pay in installments, but in the end our lawyer received all payment and it cleared to our trust account. So in total it took nearly two years, many hours of emails and phone calls, and almost $5K out of pocket to ultimately receive a $7K settlement for an appraised $10K of damages.

And that’s where this ends. It was a lot of time and effort to ultimately walk away with a fraction of the damage done. There’s a hole in the treeline that I don’t care for, a depressing stump where that huge oak used to be, and a neighbor who I can only hope has learned some lesson. Either way I’ve built a rope fence that careless workers can’t ignore as readily as property markers, but doesn’t restrict the movement of animals through the neighborhood. I like seeing deer and foxes and trees around me, thank you very much.

You read about the karmic justice cases where someone gets a six-figure payout, but from my research I gather most cases of tree law go more like this. Most trees just aren’t that valuable outside of exceptional circumstances or treble damages, and it takes a lot of money to actually engage the legal system to force an outcome. My wife and I are very fortunate to be in a position where we could afford to spend so much out of pocket in the hopes of getting repaid at some unspecified point in the future. A lot of people don’t have that luxury, and unfortunately that means little recourse in a situation like this.

I’d like to share a comment I found during my initial research. As I was reading so many comments on my previous post setting one-month reminders and certain that I was about to receive a massive payout, this was one that stayed on my mind.

“I want to manage your expectations. Most of the time tree law isn’t like bylaw. You can’t call someone and they’ll issue a fine for your neighbour to pay you. Instead, you would usually call and pay for a consulting arborist to come and evaluate the loss of the tree and replacement cost, then you would hire a lawyer and pursue your neighbour for the cost to replace the tree. It would likely take months or years. You will need to pay out of pocket for the consulting arborist and the lawyer, as I doubt anyone would take it on contingency. You can attempt to be made whole through the civil court system, but it’s not quick. And it will destroy your quiet enjoyment of your property. 

This sub can be great because you learn about how people receive huge amounts of compensation in treble damages states. The reality, though, is that litigation is very costly and very stressful.”

Spot on. Do I regret the decisions that brought us to this point? Hell no. If our neighbor hadn’t been such a blithering idiot by denying responsibility at every step along the way, we could have resolved his error with more money in both our pockets and his. He instead, after being proud of having 'only' spent $2K to have the tree unnecessarily cut down, chose to end up paying an additional $8-10K between the settlement, survey, and legal fees of his own. Sucks to suck.

In summation: Neighbor cut down our tree. Neighbor demanded we pay him $1K for doing it. Neighbor had a Lawyer Experience instead. Neighbor paid us $7K, we walked away with a bit over $2K after expenses.

If you read this far, thanks for bearing with me. I've got a plane to catch, but if anyone has questions I’ll try to answer them when I can.