Who Pays for Retaining Walls

I would think if you want them, you pay for them. And you wouldn't put a wall on the low side of your block, as you have nothing to retain.

Hey robenkel,

Al is correct. Whoever wants the retaining wall has to pay for it. Doesn't matter if it's on the high side or the low side.

Our neighbours requested one which ran nearly the length of the block...  Like  ⋅  Add a comment  ⋅  Pin to Ideaboard  ⋅  Share
They sent the request to us for approval, which we signed off on & they had it done. We didn't have to pay for any of it... (they are on the high side BTW)

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Mike.

It depends on your council.

Some councils have documents stating that the wall is the responsability of those parties who are affecting the natural slope of the land before the retaining wall was installed need to pay - if that's both - then so be it.

For an example - here is one councils approach on the subject.

http://www.marion.sa.gov.au/Web%5Cwebmar.nsf/Lookup/Information+Brochures+-+Planning+and+Building/$File/Brochure+-+Retaining+Walls+-+Who+Pays.pdf

Steve

thanks everyone! now i just wish i could find some info like that on Blacktown Councils website!

Yeah, of course, but I didn't want to state the obvious. If you want to raise the area, you pay for it. You are the one who will intrude on the neighbours open space or whatever by raising your side, so you should be responsible for making sure it conforms to council regs and you pay for it.

In some cases you'll find the retaining wall (if existing) is entirely within the property of a particular lot and not a shared boundary. One place I almost bought had an approximately three-meter retaining wall right across the back.

On investigation it turned out that the three lots behind owned the whole thing, even including a roughly 1.5-meter strip on top of the wall and back into my property.

I got an engineer to check it out and he said that the foundations of the wall were probably set back at least 1.5-meters over the drop of the wall which would bring it back to the property line.

One day that wall will need replacing and the engineer guestimated at least $120,000+ to rebuild it, quite possibly a lot more. There's no way any of that money would be recouped at sale time.

Now it may be that a wall collapse is the lower property's problem. But a collapse would mean my soil would be inundating and possibly destroying several houses below. And my house would have been at serious structural risk of undermining.

I could forsee the potential for some very ugly legal situations. They could say I was negligent in arranging drainage; had too many vines or trees close to the wall etc

After that I decided to exclude properties with big retaining walls from my search.