When selling or renting a house, it’s important to consider how your house is presented, before and after viewers head inside. If your house is the main course, your yard and gardens are a prospective buyer or renter’s entrée and dessert. Here’s how you can put the icing on the cake and increase your property value through landscaping.
- Keep your grounds low maintenance
This is key to capturing the interest of a wide range of demographics. If you’re considering revising or creating a garden bed, be careful to choose plants that are low maintenance. If you plant them in an uncluttered fashion, keen gardeners will see the potential to make their own additions, while those without a green thumb will breathe a sigh of relief while picturing themselves spending their weekends doing something they enjoy, rather than pulling weeds and taming shrubs. Your local garden centre will be able to offer guidance in this respect, but here’s a list of evergreens to get you thinking.
- Make defined edges for a tidy finish
Another feature imperative to keeping a tidy and visually effective garden is having defined edges where your lawn ends, and your garden beds begin. This can be done simply by cutting a clean, vertical edge to the grass with a square spade. Leave the resulting small trench as is if you want to keep it plain and simple – just be sure your gardener trims the grass that will grow over the edge with a strimmer held on its side.
You can achieve a more sophisticated look by adding an edging border of steel, plastic, bricks or wood. This is a job you can make as simple or complex as you like, with the amount of effort invested directly correlating to the amount of added property value generated.
- Disguise a flaw with a gem
While it’s always best to get to the heart of issues with your property, sometimes it’s more cost effective to provide a distraction from the defect. This can be done in your yard and garden with precise placement of the right type of plant. A dense shrub can help block the view into your neighbour’s spa bath, or a climber can help cover up a repaired crack in masonry.
- Add something a little different
If you have room to pull it off, go for a point-of-difference that will turn heads and stick in the memory of potential buyers or renters. This could be some hanging plants at the entrance to the property, or a large interior pot plant to help with indoor-outdoor flow. Be careful with hanging flowers though, there’s a tipping point where decoration turns into garish decadence.
- A self-sufficient kitchen window box is like candy to a keen cook
A home that bears its own fruit in the form of herbs is a real tractor beam for those who fancy themselves as a bit of a cook. It will also catch the eye of associated parties interested in eating flavoursome kai! A well-presented window box full of herbs like basil, parsley and mint will help viewers romanticise about cooking elaborate meals in their brand-new kitchen using a pinch of this and a pinch of that.
- Add another element with water
A complex water feature with spinning waterwheel, a cascading waterfall, exotic fish and neon lights would be a real showstopper, but a simple water feature like a bird bath is all that’s needed to set your property apart from the other listings on your street. Hang a bird feeder from a nearby tree and your grounds will be alive with the sights and sounds of local birdlife before you know it.
Images:
PICT1011 by Clayton SF under CC BY-NC 2.0
Watering Hole by Daniel S. under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0