Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Washington

Re: Tree Removal

You could certainly hire an arborist to come look at the trees and give you a professional opinion about their health and whether it would be smart to get them out before they keel over, or whether you can reasonably expect them to be OK for the forseeable future.

They are your trees. Your neighbor has no right to remove them. WA has a timber trespass statute that allows three times the value of the tree and attorney fees for wrongfully removing somebody else's trees.

You are responsible for the cost of removing the trees, if you make the decision to do that.

By ponying up the cost of removal, what you are avoiding is the potential cost of those trees going through your neighbor's roof.

That could be a good bargain. Other attorneys may disagree with me, but that would be the approach I'd recommend based on the facts you provided here. If there was more to the story, I might say something different.

Hope that helps. Elizabeth Powell