I made £700 by tattling on my neighbour’s ‘eyesore’ home – all it took was a few clicks.. now they refuse to speak to me

A MUM pocketed £700 dobbed in her neighbour’s “eyesore” home with only a few clicks – but they now refuse to speak to her.

Ayyesha, from Smethwick, West Midlands, reported the home after it had been locked up and abandoned for so long fly-tippers would dump their rubbish in the garden.

The mum-of-three received money back from the a business for reporting the derelict home.

The 29-year-old manager contacted YouSpotProperty.com after she became fed up of the “neighbourhood eyesore”.

Ayyesha told the Daily Record: “We know from neighbours that the owner had once lived in it years back, yet for the past five years that we’ve lived next door, it had been left unoccupied – he’d returned maybe once a year only to sweep the front step.”

She said no action was taken and fly-tippers eventually started dumping their rubbish, including mattresses, in the front garden.

The mum added: “We knew who the owner was and tried to track him down, but he failed to respond to any of our concerns, much to our frustration.”

When Ayyesha initially reported the home to YouSpotProperty last year she got a £20 voucher.

YouSpotProperty.com pays money to the public for reporting abandoned properties in England.

If the property meets their criteria – it is privately owned, not on the market and no planning permission has been applied for recently – then the person who alerts them is initially given a £20 voucher for either M&S or Amazon.

However, if YouSpotProperty.com then goes on to buy the home, that person then gets a one per cent share of the property value, up to £10,000.

Around 250,000 properties are thought to currently stand empty or derelict in England.

After the property had been tidied up and put for sale, Ayyesha said she was amazed when she got an email saying she was in line for £700 leaving her “gobsmacked”.

She said: “I hadn’t clocked the one per cent reward incentive linked to the firm actually purchasing the property.”

All she had done was taken a photo of the home and uploaded it to the company website with YouSpotProperty carrying out their own investigation.

She said: “When something is too good to be true, it usually is, however, I called YouSpotProperty following the email and was immediately answered by their finance controller who said ‘you must be Ayyesha’ – I was gobsmacked and overjoyed.”

Ayyesha said she will put the money towards throwing a 30th birthday bash.

YouSpotProperty has reportedly “rescued” more than 100 empty homes with the company handing out over 8,000 £20 vouchers over the last decade.

So far, it has paid out over 100 reward fees for homes they ultimately went onto buy, before putting them back into use.

The largest one per cent recipient is Paul Woodley, from Hertfordshire, who was paid the maximum £10,000 in 2017 after YouSpotProperty completed the purchase of a property worth £1.15million.

YouSpotPropert.com co-founder, Nick Kalms, said: “Dealing with empty homes is one of the most complex situations to resolve for local communities, as the reason they fall into this position is often so varied.

“Mostly, it’s near impossible to locate and speak to owners as they can’t easily be traced. We have a specialist team to deal with just this element.

“Often, houses are the subject of long and complicated probate following the death of an individual, and they can sit empty for years.

“Councils have limited powers and resources to allocate to this which is why they end up blighting neighbourhoods – and this is where we step in.”