Landscaping Ideas For Your Rental Property
The affordable price and spacious confines of a rental unit attract potential tenants, but savvy landlords understand it’s the amenities that motivate tenants to sign on the dotted line. From offering storage space to creating a pet-friendly environment, property managers have many ways to attract tenants. Perhaps no other amenity appeals more to tenants that the landscape surrounding your rental property.
You do not have to sculpt a backyard that looks like the landscape surrounding the Sistine Chapel. According to Utopia Management, you can enhance the value of your rental property by using a few simple, yet highly effective ideas.
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Questions to Ask Before You Start a Landscaping Project
Comprehensive landscaping projects require considerable planning and a dedication to working long hours to see the project through. To make your landscaping project run as smoothly as possible, answer three important questions.
How Much Value Does the Project Add?
A landscaping project is not abut taking care of a nuisance; it is all about investing in your property to increase its value. How much of an increase you can expect in the value of your property depends on the scope of the project and the quality of landscaping enhancements. Determine how much you want a landscaping project to increase the value of your rental property, and the plan around the value increase you want to achieve.
Will the Project Be Tenant-Friendly?
As we will see, most of the landscaping ideas for your rental property enhance the living experience of your tenants. If you permit tenants to house pets, one of the ideas for landscaping improvements can be a small park for pets to play. An area devoted to grilling and social mingling is another landscaping project to consider that appeals to your tenants.
Who Takes Care of Landscaping Maintenance?
The answer to this question comes down to cash flow. You can work language into one or more leases that in exchange for a reduction in rent, a tenant handles some, if not all of the landscaping maintenance chores. Paying a company to take care of maintenance on a regular basis is the other option.
Now, let’s see how a few landscaping ideas for your rental property benefit both you the property manager and the tenants renting units on the property.
Start with the Basics
Look at a landscaping enhancement project like an architect views building a structure. You need to establish a solid foundation to lift your landscaping vision to towards the sky. Although flowerbeds deliver unsurpassed beauty, they require a lot of work to maintain.
Adding planter boxes produces the type of visual appeal you want in the area surrounding your property, as well as eliminate weed removal and other types of time consuming maintenance projects. The landscaping professionals at Natures Friends Landscaping have plenty of ideas for planter boxes.
Remove Unsightly Clutter
Another back to basic landscaping project involves removing clutter from your property. Start by removing nature’s gifts to your yard, such as leaves and tree branches. Then, focus of pruning bushes and clearing out the weeds that form the boundary around a walkway. Outdated lawn art should find its way to the curb or to the basement, as should lawn furniture that reminds guests of the 1990s. More is not merrier when it comes to clutter around your property.
Create Shady Areas
When summer kicks up the heat a notch, shady areas on your property become coveted pieces of real estate. In addition, shade produces an attractive contrast to the sunny areas of a yard. You can install awning over an area where people congregate or strategically place umbrellas throughout your property. Nature also offers shade, which means you have to consider the best spots to plant shade trees.
Let There Be Lights
What happens when the sun disappears for another turn around the globe? Does your vibrant property during daylight hours turn not a ghost won at night? Installing lights represents an affordable and effective way to enhance the ambiance of your property. Standing lanterns placed around a deck and lights strung from one side to the other side of your property gives your tenants access to a social area throughout the day and into the night.
Add One or More Fountains
It is not just the attractive visual elements that makes a rental property popular among prospective tenants. The soothing sound of water rushing through a fountain will turn an ordinary rental property into an oasis for getting away from it all. You do not have to invoke Renaissance Era artists to create the ideal design for a water fountain. Your local home improvement store should have a large selection of water fountains that match your budget.
Not Just Any Kind of Plants
Planting a wide assortment of flowers and other types of plants produces a colorful attraction for any property. The key is to add plants that handle extreme weather events, such as high winds and torrential rains. Weather resistant plants require less water and nutrients to thrive in a wide variety of soils, which means the plants thrive in arid climates.
Hang Mirrors
Mirrors that are hung in the right spots create the illusion of increasing the amount of open space around your property. This is especially true for mirrors installed outdoors. If your rental property includes a relatively small yard, adding a couple of country-inspired mirrors should enhance the aesthetic appeal of the entire property.
Add an Outdoor Living Space
Decks and patios are the two most popular types of outdoor living spaces, but you can increase the area your tenants have to entertain guests by building a gazebo, a pergola, or an outdoor kitchen that includes plenty of dining space. A covered outdoor living space is important to keep the party going when it rains.
Property owners need to stay current with local zoning ordinances, which means any landscaping project you want to complete must comply with local statutes. Completing the right landscaping project should add value to your property, which in turn allows you to generate more money in rent.
