As our lives get busier and we spend more of our time online, we are steadily losing touch with our neighbours. According to a survey by home insurance company, Aviva, on average we know the names of just four of the neighbouring households and one in eight of us don’t know the names of anyone at all, nearby. In the UK, that’s more than 6 million people! And it’s the younger generations, especially those between 16-24 year olds, who are least likely to know any of the neighbours (24%).

Oddly, although, clearly, we don’t know them very well, we still trust them – nearly three quarters (73%) would trust a neighbour to look after a delivery for them, 38% would trust them with a spare set of keys and 36% would be happy for a neighbour to look after their home while they go away on holiday. Even more surprisingly, 40% would trust them to look after a pet and 31% would happily leave their children in their care.

If you’ll excuse the pun, it’s not a one-way street, because, in return, 80% of us say we would happily help out our neighbours with everything from looking after sets of keys or their houses while they were away to feeding their pets.

So, who do we consider the best kind of neighbour? According to various opinion polls, we like them to be comprised of mostly elderly couples and a few young families and, ideally, they would be respectable professionals, such as doctors, vets or policeman.

Whoever they may be, we don’t always get on with them. Occasionally we squabble. The most common reasons given for falling out are excessive noise, rude behaviour and boundary disputes. Beware though, if you don’t patch things up and they go legal, costs can quickly spiral out of control.

A disagreement over a pruned hedge ended up costing Rochdale resident, Barbara Buckley, £80,000. And a minor boundary dispute resulted in Manchester couple, Mary Kendrick and John Edwards, having to sell their house to pay the bill, which had reached several hundred thousand pounds.

Talking of money, your neighbours do actually have a measurable value, too (and I don’t mean in terms of legal fees). According to zoopla, 4 in 10 of us are willing to pay an average premium of £15,321 on top of a property’s value if we believed the people living next door would be good neighbours. And the way your neighbours treat their own properties can also have an effect on yours – the price of a house can be boosted by up to 12% if the neighbours’ houses are well looked after. Conversely, its value can also be reduced by up to 13% if adjacent houses are in a poor state of repair.

So, it seems, our neighbours still have an important role to play, even if we don’t know them so well these days.

Adam Beckett of Aviva sums it up rather philosophically for an insurance man:

“There can be real benefits to getting to know neighbours, both practically and emotionally. It’s great to have people who can look out for one another – as well as their homes and belongings – and provide support when needed. This in turn can have a really positive effect on people’s wellbeing.”