www.shaproperty.com

IT'S a wall. And it has divided two Siglap neighbours and their million-dollar semi-detached houses in Jedburgh Gardens in more ways than one.

At the centre of the dispute is where the wall is built.

One man claims that his neighbour's 7m-long wall, which was built back to back to the wall of his mother's property, has encroached onto his land by 15 to 20cm (or about the length of an adult's palm).

Mr Benson Ang claims that the new wall has encroached about 15cm to his side.--Picture: Kua Chee Siong

He insisted there should be a gap between the walls, as the narrow strip of land belonged to him.

So Mr Benson Ang said he approached his neighbour, Mr Gary Khoe, to reposition and rebuild his wall. That was last May.

When he saw that nothing was done, Mr Ang said he complained to Urban Redevelopment Authority and the Building and Construction Authority.

But he was told that it was a private matter for them to settle between themselves.

And so, in March this year, he decided to act. He called up several contractors to ask them if they could chip away at the wall.

When they declined, he decided to do it himself.

He grabbed a ladder, and with a jackhammer in hand, climbed to the top of the wall and started hammering and chipping away at the concrete wall.

Mr Ang, incidently, is a metrology officer.

Metrology is the science of ensuring that a measurement meets specified degrees of both accuracy and precision.

Mr Ang, 43, who currently lives alone in the house, has been living in that estate for the last 30 years. The house was bought by his parents.

His neighbour bought his house only last year. Construction for the new neighbour's two-storey house was completed around last May.

HAPPY AT FIRST

Mr Ang maintained that he was initially happy to have a new neighbour, but became upset when he found out about the encroachment.

Said Mr Ang: 'I took a look at the wall and realised that his wall has encroached onto my land and boundary. How can you do that? When you build a wall, do it on your own plot.'

The wall is linked to a 14m-long fence which leads to the front gate.

Previously, Mr Ang said there was a 15cm to 20cm gap between his wall and his old neighbour's fence, which he claimed stood in its rightful place, as the 15cm to 20cm strip of land belonged to him.

But why wasn't his wall built right to the edge then?

Mr Ang said that's because in the '60s, there was a fence separating his property and his neighbour's.

To avoid coming right up to the fence, his wall was built a small distance away from it, he explained.

When contacted by The New Paper on Sunday, Mr Khoe, a regional marketing manager, insisted he did not know that he had intruded into anyone's property.

Neither was he approached to rebuild the wall before the lawyers were involved.

In fact, he claimed that Mr Ang cut off some of the creepers growing on his fence last September and threw them over into his garden.

Mr Ang, in response, said he just 'gave' them to his neighbour.

At Mr Ang's compound on Thursday evening, there were four ladders near the wall. The wall was partly chipped and broken on the top.

There were three closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras in Mr Khoe's property pointing at the disputed wall.

Mr Ang believes they were installed after he started throwing the debris from the wall into his neighbour's house.

Said Mr Ang: 'I just wanted to denote a space of separation between the two walls.'

Mr Khoe has also filed a police report, and engaged law firm Shook Lin & Bok to help resolve the issue.

They've since sent Mr Ang a letter in April, asking him to stop tampering with the wall and throwing the debris over.

Mr Khoe claimed his neighbour usually uses the loud jackhammer when the family is not in.

'I've a video of him using the jackhammer on the wall,' said Mr Khoe.

Mr Ang has also engaged lawyers from Tan Kok Quan Partnership to help resolve the case.

'I don't want to make things difficult for a neighbour and make it unpleasant for everyone,' he added.

Mr Khoe, in turn, said that Mr Ang should have told him earlier that his wall has encroached into his property and not wait until the wall was fully built.

But Mr Ang said he didn't notice the encroachment when the construction was ongoing.

Mr Khoe claimed he only knew about the alleged boundary intrusion from Mr Ang's lawyer.

On his part, he's willing to bring a quick end to the dispute.

He said: 'Yes, my contractor did built the wall up to his wall, which could've encroached on his land. But anyway, now our lawyers are trying to resolve the issue.'

When asked to comment on the case, former Law Society president Peter Low said that neighbours should try to resolve any property-related dispute without resorting to lawsuits, which can be a lengthy and expensive process.

That explains why few of such cases end up in court.

Said Mr Low: 'For such dispute cases over boundary encroachment, you just need to employ a surveyor to find out who's encroaching on whose property. Usually, people try to resolve it themselves without using litigation.

'It's a fairly straightforward thing, and it's not often you hear of such cases going to court.'

PAY $26,000 for the land, or have the wall torn down.

This was what the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) told residents of Escada View condo in Kembangan area, according to a Straits Times report in April 2004.

This was because one of the walls there, which is a part of the condo's boundary, encroached on state property, taking up some 5 sq m of space.

The saga began when SLA discovered in 2000 that the wall extended 15cm into the adjacent plot of state land it was planning to sell.

SLA said Escada's developer, the Grandlink Group, had known about the mistake but went ahead and transferred ownership of the 80-unit property to buyers in October 2000.

SLA initially offered the residents the land for $26,000, based on its market price in March 2002.

But the residents refused, arguing that the mistake was not theirs and it was unfair for them to pay for the developer's mistake.

The residents approached then Aljunied GRC MP Ong Seh Hong for help in late 2002, and SLA lowered the price to $16,000 after the appeal.

Unhappy with the amount, the residents appealed again and finally, SLA settled for a lower sum of $6,300.

But only after the management committee assured that the land would not be used to increase the floor area of the development.