'Landscape' as % cost, or: most homes aren't really complete

15 years ago

I know that the "percent of home price that should be spent on landscape" is not intended as a hard and fast rule, but one thing I wanted to observe is that in today's homes (not necessarily different from days gone by), most homes, as marketed, really aren't "finished" with regard to necessary hardscape and landscaping to make them really functional--they're just homes on bare ground, and you the buyer can just figure out how to get to your backyard without getting covered in mud, or just pay for AC in the broiling sun, or whatever.

I realize this is not a new discovery, but it speaks to the idea, as in a recent post of the poster asking whether $50k is a good price for a landscape bid on his apparent $150 k home--his post seems to be more about the charges for the work proposed, but one can also extend the ideas to wonder how much someone should invest in their home landscape, and how much it depends on all sorts of values.

Really, when we buy our homes, we don't get much education and only learn the hard way that perhaps a $150 k home with $30-50K (or more) worth of really appropriate landscaping and hardscape may be a much better value, and be more livable, than the $200k home with nothing, or that it may be a lot cheaper to add granite counters to a humbler but well-landscaped home than to add an instantly aged landscape to the new tract home.

Again, this is roundabout, but it seems like there is just no one "out there" addressing the niche of, how a home buyer could evaluate the "landscapability" of the prospective properties. We seem to turn our thoughts to the landscape after the deal is closed and then go, dawgies! I can't possibly afford a patio, or whatever.

I don't even think it is completely about how much someone "values" landscape, though of course it is at that very instant that the home is selected, as it is a combination of ignorance and of progressing through life's stages so that if you are buying your first home, especially, you maybe just don't have any reference point yet for what you may soon come to value in the landscape.

Of course this apparently goes up against market forces, since apparently the great majority of people prefer more "interior" house and less outdoor-relatedness, and therefore will buy the other guy's more-house-house before they buy your smaller house with covered patio, pergola, brick walks and so forth.

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Comments (2)

jakkom
15 years ago
Added to the difficulties frankie_zone7 outlines so nicely above, is the fact that most working couples I know have very little time to spend maintaining, let alone installing, any kind of extensive yardscape. They love to use it, but are lacking both time AND money.

I come from a family of renters, my DH comes from a home where 'mow and blow' gardeners take care of the small urban front yards - neat little rectangles of green lawn, sterile and unchanging. As newbie homeowners in 1989, we would have had absolutely no idea how much landscaping cost had it not been for a timely and accurate newspaper article that appeared in our local paper. I've never seen another one like it, actually.

The article described a property almost exactly like the one we had just purchased: 5000 sq. ft., a small amount of hardscape (driveway, front and back door paths, small 8x10 patio) already installed. They detailed what it would cost to add more hardscape - enlarge the patio, add more walkways for access, add a small storage shed, put in plants and a couple of trees where only grass and weeds once existed.

This was almost exactly what we wanted to do, in fact. It was a real eye-opener to us ignorant newbies that the cost of this install by a professional was estimated (remember this is 1989) to range from $50-75K!

This was for a $180K cottage, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Big, big gulp!!

Since we were extremely strapped for cash, long years - 12 yrs, in fact - went by before we could start landscaping. In the end, we did most of it ourselves. However, my DH suffered a stroke during this time, so the final phase of it was done by someone we hired to implement the remainder of our design.

We did save a lot of money doing most of it ourselves. But it is a lot of work, and I have to say that if I could have afforded to have someone do it, I would have been happy to hire it all out. I do certainly appreciate that a professional would have earned their $50K. It was a lot of manual labor and needed a good amount of thought to integrate our existing hardscape into a cohesive and attractive whole. Because we aren't pros, it took us a long time to design each phase and then install it. As the one who does all the gardening, I can tell you I did a lot of things wrong in the plant selection as well, although the overall design has always worked.

An amateur can do a good job, but it takes a whole lot of research and sweat equity to pull it off successfully - and that's assuming the amateur possesses good design sense, which not everyone does.
laag
15 years ago
The old number that used to get tossed around twenty five years ago was 10% as a minimal rule of thumb. That had to do with real estate value rather than lifestyle value. I think most of us would agree that there has been a considerable shift of a larger proportion of the population looking for more outdoor amenities.

I believe that has changed expectations in the real estate market. Whether or not your lifestyle has use for these amenities, they have become expected in many markets and not so much in others. Where having them in the past was a bonus, now not having them has become a negative in the house value for a larger range of property types.

Almost everyone has a home, so television shows, magazines, and articles about the home are hotly consumed. Everyone, it seems, wants granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, 6 burner stoves, a "media room", and everything else. Outside, they want a lot of the stuff that "everyone else" has.

If the size of all amenities was in equal proportion to the house price, the percentage of cost might hold that proportion. The problem is that less well-to-do people take up the same amount of space as wealthy people (for the most part). Size is often more driven by use than income when it comes to outdoor spaces. Cost can be more easily controlled by level of craftsmanship and materials rather than size.

Typically amenities take a higher percentage of the value of the house as the value of the house lowers. Until or unless your house is in a market where a lack of these amenities are a greater detriment to selling price than they cost to create, you should only invest in them because of the personal value they add to the quality of your life rather than that of the real estate.

This is an example of two sets of values. One is personal and the other is that of the market. Both are highly variable. You know your personal values, but sometimes it is harder to understand where the house fits in the market and what the value of those amenities is in that market. It is also important to realize that certain houses or where they are tend to be more appealing to one set of demographics and less appealing to another. Amenities (wheter plants or hardscapes or both) can be a dream to one demographic and a nightmare to others (swimming pool for example, or large well tended garden).

This is what is great about almost anything in landscape design - there are endless variables. You don't have to use all of them, but you should always keep your head up not to be victimized by one.
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'Landscape' as % cost, or: most homes aren't really complete

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jakkom

laag

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