How to Reduce Your Landscape Maintenance Costs in 2023 & Beyond

As we start 2023 many of us have been tasked with reducing our spending in the short term in an attempt to combat inflation, offset reduced revenues, and help prepare our companies for a potentially challenging economic downturn. 

If you find yourself in that position regardless if you manage a single 5-acre property or are responsible for 1000's of properties across the nation, below are a few levers you can pull today to reduce your cost without sacrificing the health or aesthetic of your property:

👉 Install smaller, more impactful seasonal color/flower displays. 🌸💐

Flowers are an incredible feature for any property that wants its visitors to enjoy and be attracted to the overall aesthetic, if you have historically invested in numerous rounds of flowers for massive displays, consider reducing the number of rounds of color from 4 to 3 or 3 to 2 rounds and having your current provider make recommendations for smaller, more impactful displays. Well-positioned, dense flower displays with vibrant colors and unique designs can be even more impactful than a massive display that cost’s much more. 

A long-term play for seasonal color that does cost more in year 1 is installing a perennial that will come back and produce a beautiful look season after season. Your upfront cost is more and over time as long as the perennial stay’s healthy and produces the visual you seek to accomplish on your property your cost is significantly less than installing flowers annually. 

👉 Reduce mulch install depth or only install in high visibility areas. 👩 🌾🏡

If your property has a significant amount of beds that require mulch annually you know besides mowing, mulch is likely your largest cost driver. Your provider might not say this openly, but across the board, we have a tendency to install too much mulch, too often. 2-3 inches of typically a black dyed mulch that takes a long time to break down, installed annually is a waste of money for the customer and in many cases can lead to your provider offering you “mulch reduction” services. 

If you’ve consistently received mulch with a healthy install depth, ask your provider to reduce your install depth to 1 inch. This will reduce the material cost significantly and shave a few labor hours off of the job as well, which translates to cost savings for your property, without sacrificing the beautiful aesthetic of fresh mulch or the sustained benefit of weed suppression and fertilization of the bed. 

If you need to reduce the cost further, identify the high-traffic areas on your site that are an absolute must to mulch, areas that are customer-facing and will be critiqued by visitors. Have your provider update their agreement with you to only mulch those areas this season.  

👉 Reduce mid-summer mowing occurrences. ♻️

This might be considered an extreme measure by some standards. However, if you have a large property and the conditions are right and you and your provider are on the same page it’s an excellent way to reduce your spending or redirect the labor hours you’ve already purchased on other work around the property when the grass is temporarily dormant. 

This tactic won’t work for irrigated properties that have their irrigation up and running, but if you represent a large segment of the commercial properties across many markets you don’t have an irrigation system (or it's not turned on) and there is an excellent chance every summer your turf goes dormant for a few weeks like clockwork. An example of this would be a property in Columbus, OH, Indianapolis, IN, or Pittsburgh, PA if your current agreement has 28 to 32 mows and you do not have irrigation, there is an opportunity to reduce your number of occurrences by anywhere from 2-6 mows depending on your situation, expectations, and tolerance. 

Many contractors will not offer these ideas or solutions without being asked directly because they reduce their revenue in the short term and that can be painful in the short term. So, you will need to initiate this conversation in many instances, especially with the current economic climate because the inverse of cost savings is finding ways to increase revenue and protect the dollars already on your books. 

Every property and situation is unique in landscape maintenance, if you need help with this process of reviewing the current state of your property, reviewing your current scope of work, and aligning the scope with your current and future goals please reach out to me directly to start our property assessment and recommendation process.

Cost Savings Example - Annual Landscape Maintenance Spend $50k  

The customer and contractor decide to go all in on reducing the spend on a site for the 2023 season to help the client free up some budget to cover an unexpected capital expense project that their corporate office won't approve this fiscal, but the 50k maintenance budget is approved and available.

The site does not have irrigation and currently has 28 mow occurrences on their agreement, additionally, they've historically installed 100 Cubic Yards of black-dyed mulch every year for the past 6 years and they always buy flowers off-contract, 3 rounds per year without fail.

The customer is comfortable with cutting 1 round of flowers out completely and installing smaller, more impactful displays. Instead of 3 rounds of seasonal color with a 400sq/ft installed amount, they install 2 rounds of 200sq/ft, reducing the total flowers purchased from 1200sq/ft to 400sq/ft and roughly from a $10k spend to a $3,333 spend or nearly a $7k cost savings.

Additionally, they decide to reduce the mulch install to 60 Cubic Yards, 1-inch install instead of 2, with an additional 10 yards to install thicker in the highest traffic areas. Rough math their cost goes from $12,000 to $7,500, saving another $4,500.

Finally, they reduce the mow occurrences from 28 to 26 and the customer agrees, they are comfortable skipping a few mows during the hot dry months, even if the turf gets a little long between services in a few areas. Reducing their cost by roughly another $2,000.

This scenario represents a possibility for many properties within the multi-family, HOA, and corporate or class-a-office space world. The total cost savings annually is $13,500, enough to cover a surprise Capex project depending on the size and significant cost savings regardless of what is driving the need to reduce spending.

"How to Reduce Your Landscape Maintenance Cost in 2023 & Beyond" - Published By Anthony Alfieri - January 17th, 2022