How much of the fence do they have to fix?

Q: We own a rental house in Suisun City. Last week the tenants crashed their car into the redwood fence that runs next to the driveway and garage. The fence is more than 150 feet long, goes past the garage and serves as the side-yard fence for the back yard.

The fence is old, like 20 years old, but still had a few years of life in it. If just the section of fence that was damaged by the tenants is replaced, we’ll have the brand-new wood in a couple of sec tions with weathered wood in the rest of the fence, which will look horrible. So, my question is, are the tenants respon sible for replacing the entire fence? And if they are, do they have to pay for a new fence or do they get to prorate it somehow since the fence is old to begin with? How do we figure this out?

A: I get fence questions all the time but this one is rather unique. So well done.

Probably the best example I can point to is what happens when you get into a fender bender in the Costco parking lot.

Let’s say you’re driving your brandnew Tesla, trying to get a parking spot as close to the front door as possible, and somebody comes screaming out of a parking space and hits the side-rear of your car. Of course, they’re driving a Hummer, which is big enough and heavy enough to bend the entire frame of your car. The insurance company says the car’s totaled.

How much does the Hummer’s insurance have to pay?

Since your car is brand new, chances are it’s worth what you paid for it, so the Hummer owes you the full price of the car. Congrats.

But let’s say you were driving your 1996 Toyota Corolla with 245,000 miles on it. Does the Hummer owe you the price of a new Corolla? Does it owe you what you originally paid for the car in 1996?

OK, spoiler alert; Hummer owes you today’s value of a 1996 Toyota Corolla with a quarter million miles on it. In other words, enough for a nice meal for four at McDonald's.

Now, let’s say your brand-new Tesla wasn’t totaled. It was just severely “dinged.”

There will need to be extensive repairs and new paint on

You could argue that an expensive new car that has had to be patched and painted isn’t the same as a pristine new car (even if the repair isn’t visible to the naked eye). And you’d have a point. But not a point the insurance company would

You’d get enough money to patch and paint. In other words, to repair the damage to the point that the car is substantially, if not exactly, as it was before

You see where we’re heading with

Theoretically, your tenants are responsible for fixing just the damaged part of the fence. And, theoretically, they could argue that since the fence has maybe used up 80% of its lifespan, they’d only have to pay you 20% of the actual cost of repairing it.

At first glance, none of this sounds fair.

You were happy driving your 1996 Corolla. You had wheels and they are long paid for. Now you don’t have wheels and, given the current cost of cars, may have to take out a third mortgage on your home to buy a new one. But you’d have a new car. So there’s that.

Same with the fence.

That old portion of the fence worked fine for you. But maybe, someday in the near future, when you have to replace the whole fence there will be some sections that will be so new you’ll save a few bucks just replacing the old portion.

Tim Jones is a real estate attorney in Fairfield. If you have any real estate questions you would like to have answered in this column, you can send an email to AllThingsRealEstate@ TJones-Law.com.