Free landscaping?

[Joan.of.the.Arch]

Have you seen this?

Around my city, I've been noticing that when a residential building gets a total rehab including the landscaping, the immediate next door neighbors sometimes get new landscaping at the same time!

I'm thinking the investor wants to present the "new" home in a really nice looking setting, so they renew the neighbors' lawns, plant new shrubs and place new mulch, sometimes even paint the neighbor's porch trim and clean their stone stairs!

It doesn't seem to be a case of the neighbors just being inspired by the fresher view next door. You can see the new lawns being laid out and irrigated as a unit.

On my own block, one house got a new concrete walk between the houses, plus a walk across the front of their house when the house next door got the same. That might have been expensive. Oddly though, another rehabbed house on my block put in a pebble textured front sidewalk and then replaced only half of the next door neighbor's adjoining sidewalk.

Have you seen this going on? Maybe it is just a new practice in my older city.

[ua_guy]

Not uncommon.

A couple years ago, a subdivision of ticky-tacky homes all spaced 1" apart went in a few miles from us. It was a square parcel that was to be subdivided except for a lone single-family holdout in the corner--they weren't willing to sell to the developer. Right next to the entrance to the neighborhood. It was an older rambler.

The developer paid to re-side it, new paint, and clean up the landscaping. Another house we looked at, which was new construction on an old lot, the builder paid to have a fence put around the neighbor's property. Imagine a new 2500 sqft house with granite countertops next to a 1970's double-wide with junk all over the yard.

Another example-- a couple years ago we had an asphalt paving company doing a big job across from our development. It was a small company. The owner went door-to-door in our neighborhood offering to re-pave driveways on the cheap since they had all their equipment out there anyway. I think a total of 6 people in our neighborhood bought in, including us and our next door neighbor. I think the total price came out to be about 3k which was quite a bargain. They did them on the same day and wow what a difference. We also got the guy to re-shape the driveway and make it about 30% bigger.