Why Homes Need an Irrigation System: Nothing Else Impacts Resale Value More

Why Homes Need an Irrigation System: Nothing Else Impacts Resale Value More

As an irrigation contractor, you do a fair amount of driving around and seeing different homes in different neighborhoods. No doubt, you have seen enough degrees of landscaping – from the very lush and ornate to the parched, cracked dirt with weeds – to know what’s attractive and what’s not.

Yes, you know the value that landscaping can add to a home…but do your potential customers know? And can you sell them on the benefits that they will receive from beautifying their grounds?

Better yet, can you sell them on the reason why you should be the one to handle the task of installing and maintaining that beautification?

From a visual standpoint, it’s easy to see how landscaping can benefit a home. Simply put, it looks more attractive. A home with green grass is more eye catching than the exact same home with bad grass or no grass. Add in some well-manicured trees and shrubs and some colorful flowers and you increase the curb appeal of the home even more.

Increase Home Resale Value by 15%

According to PBS-TV personality Bob Thomsen, former host of the award-winning Victory Garden show, quality landscaping on a home can increase the resale value of that property as much as 15 percent! Of course, not every customer of yours is planning to move soon (maybe not at all), but virtually every homeowner is still concerned with their home’s current market value.

Thomsen noted that the economic value of landscaping is so great it has prompted numerous studies and tests. And the data has consistently shown that landscaping provides a home with a recovery rate (the percentage return on an investment when it is applied to a home’s resale value) of 100 to 200 percent.

No other home improvement project offers that high a rate of recovery.

“Although homeowners will often remodel the kitchen, bathroom or bedrooms in hopes of commanding a higher asking price,” said Thomsen, “one nationwide study indicates that 62 percent of all homeowners believe that landscaping is as good, or better, an investment as remodeling a kitchen or bath.”

And, according to Thomsen, when you consider how interior remodeling can disrupt a home for weeks or months, you can put a potential customer at ease when you let them know that landscaping is a less intrusive project. The work takes less time to complete, plus there’s a better return on their investment.

Green Today. Green Tomorrow?

Of course, any contractor can install mature sod and plants, then walk away from the property with a picture perfect landscape. But, how will those grounds look in a month? Or a year?

Your customer is going to invest hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars in a beautiful landscape. An irrigation system will be the insurance plan to make sure that their investment thrives.

Remind the homeowner that real estate appraisers judge a home’s landscape on its appearance, condition and maintenance. They also compare that home to other homes in the neighborhood and look at the functional use of the landscape items incorporated into the plan, including the irrigation system.

A professionally installed and maintained system can be an asset to the property, while a poorly designed and installed system can actually be a liability. Something for a homeowner to think about when they want to cut a corner today that might come back and haunt them in the future.