For property management professionals, a reliable landscape service partner is essential to achieving your communitys goals.
For property management professionals, a reliable landscape service partner is essential to achieving your community’s goals. It’s so important because, if yours is like most communities, landscaping is one of the largest line items in the annual budget. Unfortunately, if it isn’t performing up to expectations, it may also be the source of most of the complaints you receive from your residents.
Once called curb appeal, quality landscaping has become so much more important in recent years, because it directly impacts the resale value of your residents’ homes. With the emergence of resort-style communities, resident expectations are higher than ever. Community entrances, streetscapes, pools, and other amenity centers are huge marketing advantages when residents are selling their homes, and buyers are sure to notice if these areas are maintained at anything less that the resort-style expectations that they have for their new home.
Landscaping is one of the simplest ways that your community establishes its identity. Simply by insisting on annual flower rotations at entrances and regularly filling in mulch or pine straw, the community keeps a vibrant appearance and demonstrates that the residents care about their homes. Consistently performing basic landscape maintenance – mowing on a regular schedule, edging sidewalks and streets, keeping beds weed free, removing trash - a more positive community image is presented and, in turn, encourages residents to take more pride in their own homes.
A community manager that demands a quality landscape service partner will be more successful than one who settles for a mow, blow and go provider. The right landscape service partner brings value to the community they serve by pointing out areas for improvement. A professional landscape service partner lays out a roadmap for the long term success of newly developed communities or, in established communities, they create revitalization plans for maturing plants and trees. Proactive solutions brought to the resident board demonstrate not only the quality of the landscape service provider, but the quality of the property management professional who brings in service partners that are invested in the community’s success.
Finally, finding a professional landscape service partner is directly related to how you protect your community and keep residents safe. So many times we see communities that haven’t held their landscapers accountable for keeping residents safe. Irrigation systems that overspray onto sidewalks and walking trails, shrubs that have become overgrown and obstruct driveways and curves in roadways, leaves not removed in a timely manner, and trees that have not been pruned properly with branches lifted to a safe height. Keeping residents safe from these easily preventable accidents is an obvious demonstration of your commitment to the community and resident safety.
Whether your community includes 20 homes or 2000, the landscape service partner you select speaks volumes about how you manage the property and will define the community’s image in a way that few other vendor services can. If you have any doubts about the message your property’s landscape is sending, it might be time to look for a new landscape service partner.
Does this bare patch of turf make you want to invest in a home here?