Example of a garden. Photo by Kimberly Dotseth.
How can a garden make your house more sellable? Kimberly Dotseth, broker and owner of Green Box Homes in San Diego, explains how in this guest post. Does her name ring a bell? Her first guest blog in the U-T San Diego real estate blog was Why Pinterest is not for real estate. She’ll now be blogging for us periodically.
One of my clients has a half-acre yard with a nice house on it that we listed for sale a few years ago, but the market wasn’t cooperating and we couldn’t get the price we wanted. We worked to get that house sold for many months with no luck.
The lot is mostly in the back of the house and is fully terraced. It is spectacular. Grass and trees everywhere. The highlight for me as his real estate broker wasn’t the protected open space that lead off the backyard, but the endless and bountiful tomato patches. (During weekly open houses, I got quite a few tomatoes.) They were growing wild and untended, as the client had already moved out of the house.
It’s been five years since we tried to sell that house, which is now a rental, and what saddens me the most is that those gorgeous, tangled tomatoes were turned over by his gardener, who also is my gardener. Why the tomatoes, I asked? Just because, I was told. I have never had tomatoes that good, and I grew up in the Midwest where you can find a very good summer tomato.
What is the next “big thing” in real estate? It’s not more photos or better photos. While extraordinarily helpful, they only get the client from the computer to the property. It’s two little words: organic garden.
To be able to type those words into the Multiple Listing Service, a hundred words or so composed to tell a story and sell a home, creates legitimate wow factor to the reader. That reader is typically a buyer.
A common trait we all share is the desire to eat healthy food. The ideal organic garden for a single detached home is a patch of dirt with fertilizer, five feet-by-five feet, growing a variety of things like berries, tomatoes, herbs, beans and lettuce — if you can keep the bunnies away from it organically.
Fruit tree planted by Kimberly Dotseth. Photo by Kimberly Dotseth.
If you have the capacity to grow trees, then by all means consider lemon, lime, orange and avocado, although avocado can take over a small garden and each tree needs about seven years to make avocados. Better yet, leave those to the experts in Fallbrook.
Aside from specifically what you grow, the point is that you should grow something particularly if you want to sell this summer. Start within the next month or two and build a garden you can manage. Whether it’s traditional and directly in the dirt, or on a townhouse patio using only pots or some combination of the two, you will be selling a buyer the garden lifestyle – small or large. And everything goes with the house: abundant garden pots included.