An Unkempt Yard Turns Buyers Away Quickly

When the trees open their leaves, the flowers bloom and the birds sing, the pace of real estate speeds up. But if the flowers are dead, the grass is withered and the trees show some dangerous-looking dead branches, watch out.

Buyers will turn away from a house if the yard’s a mess.

“It affects sales; it definitely does,” explains Lois Moore, a real estate agent with 33 years experience.

“There’s a curb appeal which takes in the living aspect of the house and it is the No. 1 factor in marketing a property. It will market a property - do all your work for you.”

Buyers want and expect a tidy yard and healthy plantings.

Home sellers who think that dandelions in the front and a dirtscape in the back won’t affect the value of their real estate are wrong, says Moore.

“I’ve had people fall in love with a house and then they go in back and see this hillside that you can’t do anything with without terracing.

“Or people whose flower gardens are all overgrown and the grass hasn’t been cared for and it’s a mess. These buyers are active people. They don’t have time to redo a yard,” she says.

When Moore has a listing on a vacant house, she’s trimmed bushes and planted flowers herself to help it sell. If the listing agent is too busy to do the work, he or she should hire someone else to do it, she recommends.

“But the ones (sellers) who’ve been creative and have their gardens here and there, people get so positive about it. It’s amazing how many buyers today are gardeners. And they weren’t that way 20 years ago. The families are moving outside.”

When buyers make an offer on a house with an unkempt yard, they’ll take more off the asking price than it will cost them in time and money to hire out the yard work and gardening, says Moore.

“It’s the same for a garage sale. The people who make all the money are the ones who polish their stuff all up. They’ll make twice the money on something.”

On the other side of the coin, or geranium, so to speak, sellers who are packing to leave sometimes forget about the importance of the yard and garden.

“They have a tendency to lose interest in the beauty of the place because they’re thinking of moving out. But I encourage them to buy flowers, petunias and such, and put them in a pot on the front porch. It makes a difference,” she says.

Flaws in a house are more noticeable when there are flaws in the landscaping, like a dead tree or a dead bush.

“What I tell people is that front door approach is so important. When they (buyers) pull up to the curb and they see things undone, they become more critical as they come through the front door. And they look at those other things in a house that might need work,” says Moore.

Cascading flower baskets, a weedfree garden, a brilliantly green, fertilized lawn can turn apathetic shoppers into eager buyers.

“You can disguise and conceal flaws by surface beauty,” she says.

And that beauty can come fairly cheap.

“The return for your investment is definitely protected with exciting landscaping, and it doesn’t have to be expensive. If money is the criteria, that’s why they have packages of seeds.”