Fsbo

If you want to sell your house, the usual drill is to clean the closets, repaint chipped kitchen cabinets and call a broker. Then, to boost the price, many people hire a professional stylist or "stager" to fine tune the décor.

But what about those overgrown hedges, the crab grass in the backyard and borders that have seen better days? Gardens and landscaping are often overlooked when a seller spruces up a home.

Barbara Schwarz, a broker and founder of the Web site Staged Homes, which offers an accredited staging program, says that pruning a garden is as critical to selling as creating a Real Simple-inspired interior.

Her tips include weeding and mulching, maintaining freshly trimmed ground cover like ivy, and placing evergreens or pots of flowering annuals near the front door to make the home more welcoming.

Some experts say that overgrown gardens should be avoided. Others believe that buyers prefer houses with larger shrub borders and smaller lawns, so there is less grass to mow. Real estate organizations do not specifically track the impact of landscape improvements. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a well-tended garden does add a certain cachet as part of a home’s overall renovation and could add dollars, too.

Ms. Schwarz, for example, said she recently sold a house in Seattle for $1.9 million that had been on the market for 11 months at $1.4 million, after the owners invested $25,000 in staging improvements that included limbing up trees to allow more light into the house and removing shrubbery.

There is general agreement that water features like ponds, waterfalls and fountains that require a minimum of care are a safe bet for adding value. Perhaps that is why sales of water features grew to $1.6 billion in 2003, representing a growth of 19 percent annually since 1998, according to the National Gardening Association.

Swimming pools, however, are less likely to produce a good return, unless they are in a gardenlike setting. Because of their high maintenance costs and safety and liability issues, pools rarely realize a return on the investment, especially in colder northern regions, said John Brenan, the director of research and technical issues at the Appraisal Foundation, which sets standards for appraisers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 8th, 2008 at 7:28 am and is filed under FSBO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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