Landscaping Tips for Home Sellers

Boosting curb appeal in summer can be difficult for home sellers. Keeping on top of watering and maintaining your quickly growing lawn can help.

Landscaping Tips for Home Sellers Close
Page Summary

Landscaping Tips for Home Sellers

Posted by Gary Ashton on Friday, September 28th, 2018 at 1:00pm.

Yard Landscaping Tips to Attract BuyersPlants like the bright sun and intense heat, but only to a point. When the sun is its hottest at the height of summer, some landscaping can become dried out and stressed. As a home seller, this can hurt your home's curb appeal. Dry, brittle landscape and browning flowers can make your home seem poorly maintained and unattractive. To avoid problems with the sale, home sellers may need to spend extra time tending your garden and managing the plants. Keeping your garden lush, green, and inviting for home buyers can help you sell your home.

Set Up An Automatic Sprinkler System

Moving and selling a house can be very time-consuming, so when the home selling process picks up, you may find that you're too busy to water your lawn. Take advantage of any in-ground sprinkler systems on your property. Repair any broken sprinkler heads at the beginning of the summer to ensure that your lawn will be properly watered throughout the season if your home has no in-ground sprinkler system, set up a sprinkler and a timer to ensure that your lawn is watered regardless of whether or not you have time to do the watering yourself.

Restore Your Lawn

Grass can get very dry and brown throughout our long summers if it's not well-watered and maintained. If your grass is dry after a summer of baking in the sun, increase your watering schedule to rehydrate your lawn. Water in the evening or early morning to reduce evaporation and ensure that your lawn is properly saturated.

Trim your grass regularly with a sharp-bladed lawnmower, but avoid cutting more than 1/3 of the height of the grass when it's time to cut. This will reduce the shock and help keep your grass healthy. After watering your lawn regularly for about two weeks, apply low nitrogen fertilizer to promote healthy growth.

Keep the Grass Trim

Overgrown grass can be unattractive for home buyers and can make your home look unkempt. Cut your grass weekly to ensure that your home's lawn always looks its best for showings and open houses. Remember that buyers can show up or drive by at any time, so your grass will need to be cut even if you don't have any showings scheduled. If you're too strapped for time to cut your lawn, hire a gardener to help keep up with the maintenance. The average price of lawn mowing in Nashville is $40 per service, according to LawnStarter.

Remove Dry Plants and Debris

Get rid of any dry or dead plants and debris on your lawn. Cutaway any branches on the trees that aren't producing green, healthy growth. Leave only those plants that appear to be healthy.

Deadhead Throughout the Summer

Annuals live to produce seeds. Once they have flowered and seeds have been scattered, their growth may slow. Deadheading, the process of pulling dying blossoms from the plants to prevent them from going to seed, can help your annual flowers broom productively throughout the summer.

Mulch

Mulch can be used to hold in moisture and prevent your plants from drying out. Mulch also suppresses weed growth and hides organic debris like sticks and twigs. Before putting your house on the market, lay down mulch between flowers and in flower pots to help reduce the amount of time you spend watering and to ensure that your garden beds look their best.

Remove Brown or Dried Out Shrubs

Despite your best efforts to maintain your lawn throughout the summer, some of your plants may still dry out and die. Dead plants and shrubs can be a distraction from the beauty of your property. Remove dead plants as soon as you've noticed them. Dispose of them in a trash can or in an out-of-the-way location where they won't be obvious to homeowners.

Consider a Rock Garden

Consider installing a rock garden in the hottest, brightest areas of your lawn. This will fill the space without using plants and will be easier to maintain as you try to sell your home.

Install a Shady Spot to Sit

Selling a Home in Summer

On a 90 degree day in the middle of summer, your lawn might seem hot, dry, and overwhelming to home buyers. Providing home buyers and guests a place in the shade where they can rest and take in the scenery can help make your home more inviting and pleasant. Somewhere on your back lawn, set up a patio table, chairs, and a patio umbrella for shade.

Upholstered padding and pillows will help make your chairs or benches a more pleasant place to sit when the weather is hot, but these pads will need to be kept clean throughout the summer. Dust off the chairs and clean off the table regularly to ensure that visitors will want to sit and spend time. During open houses and home showings, consider putting a pitcher of icy lemonade and a few cups on the table to set the scene.

Give Extra Water to New Plants, Trees, and Shrubs

If you planted a new tree or new shrubs this spring, your new plants might not be fully established until they've been in the ground for at least a year. To ensure these plants survive the summer, you'll need to provide extra water, especially when the temperatures become uncomfortably warm. Add mulch around the base of new trees and shrubs to hold in this moisture, but avoid putting mulch up against the trunk of your trees. Mulch that touches the base of the trees could cause fungus.

Plant Drought-Tolerant Flowers and Shrubs

Intense sun and dry soil can make planting and establishing new plants very difficult. If you must plant new shrubs and flowers on your lawn, pick drought-tolerant, sun-loving plant varieties for the best chance of success—water daily or every other day in the first couple of weeks.

Work With Your Real Estate Agent

For more answers and ideas about improving the landscape and quickly and inexpensively improving curb appeal, talk to your Nashville real estate agent at the Ashton Real Estate Group of RE/MAX Advantage. After looking at your property, we can help you make well-informed suggestions for improving your landscaping before selling your home this summer.

An experienced real estate agent will know a lot about staging a property and will be able to give you helpful tips to boost curb appeal. Before putting your home on the market, talk to your real estate agent about the various ways that you can stage your property and make your landscaping more appealing to buyers.

 

Gary Ashton

The Ashton Real Estate Group of RE/MAX Advantage

The #1 RE/MAX team in the World!

Leave a Comment