Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
It’s a seller’s market, but that doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed to sell your home quickly or at your desired price. You need to make sure that buyers are interested in putting offers on your property — and that means investing a little in your home’s curb appeal.
Landscaping can increase the value of your property by upwards of 10 percent, so it is worthwhile to get out your trimmers and edgers to keep your home’s exterior in tip-top shape. Here are a few simple landscaping tasks that will radically improve the look of your home and get you the offers you deserve.
The more time and effort you put into sprucing up the bed bordering your home and lawn, the better. To start, you should clean up the edges of your lawn, perhaps carving your turf into a trendy organic shape or else making sure the borders of your beds are perfectly crisp. Next, you should trim back any shrubs in your beds, making them look more manageable for yard maintenance. For both of these tasks, it might be wise to invest in trimmers and edgers, as the right tools make any yard chore faster and easier. If you want, you can include the new tools in the sale of your home, also helping to increase the price.
Once your beds are clean and clear, you should fill any empty spots, making your landscaping look lush. You should try to add some diversity into your flowerbeds, choosing new plants that offer a different height, texture or color to the plants already represented. Once you choose a few new plants, you should plant them in groups of three, which visually fills the space more effectively than individual plants.
Finally, once your new plants are in the ground, you should cover your beds with a fresh layer of mulch. Depending on where you live and how recently you updated your landscape, you may need to scrape away the top layer of debris in your flowerbeds, removing moss, fungus and decomposing topsoil, before you apply the mulch of your choice.
Most homes have a few empty patio pots sitting around. If you aren’t planning on packing those up and taking them to your new home, you might use them to increase your old house’s curb appeal. By filling those pots with brightly colored flowers, you can make your home look wholesome and inviting. You should choose flowers that are seasonally appropriate, which will reduce the amount of work you will need to do to keep them alive as long as your home is on the market. Hopefully, your home will sell before the flowers die, so you can pass the work of continuously updating your flowerpots onto your buyers.
Water features add incredible value to your property. A bubbling fountain elevates the sophistication of a garden; a pond filled with koi makes a property feel unique; a swimming pool is an exciting space for entertainment. However, none of these water features will entice buyers if they look dingy and gross. It does not take long for a neglected water feature to turn grimy, as water will inevitably grow algae, attract pests and develop unwelcome odors. The sooner you can make your water features appear beautiful, the better. You might be able to shock your water features clean with the right chemicals, but in some cases, it might be best to drain away the water and scrub with elbow grease.
Outdoor living is a major trend in home ownership, and many buyers will be considering whether they can see themselves taking full advantage of your property’s landscape to entertain, relax and take in fresh air. However, many outdoor spaces look onto the yards and gardens of neighbors — if not directly through neighbors’ windows and into their homes — and that lack of privacy can be disconcerting. Either before putting your home on the market or after you have seen a few weeks without any enticing offers, you might consider creating a sense of privacy in your outdoor space. A fence along the property line, tall hedges around the patio or some other type of privacy screen can be valuable additions that might take a day or two to install.
As the seller, you have full control over how your home looks, which mean you have the power to increase its selling price. Because the landscape is such an important selling point of a home, you should consider all the ways you can improve your landscape to improve your return on your property.
