Does Landscaping Really Increase Home Value? What the Data Actually Shows

The 20% landscaping ROI figure circulates widely in real estate and home improvement marketing, and the striking thing about it is that no study produces it. The research that is usually gestured at measures something narrower: how much more a photograph of a well-landscaped house front is judged to be worth (5–11%, Behe et al. 2005), or what one specific project recovers against one specific cost (NAR and NALP, eleven projects). Neither produces a percentage for "landscaping" as a whole, because neither asks that question. A whole-garden percentage is a repetition artefact, not a finding.

The original research was limited in scope, applied to specific markets and price points, and measured buyer perception of value (how much more buyers were willing to offer) rather than appraised value. The distinction matters: appraised value is what a home is worth according to comparable sales data; buyer willingness to pay is a psychological number influenced by presentation and first impressions.

What the research actually shows is more nuanced and more useful: specific landscaping investments generate specific, measurable returns — and the variation between them is enormous. Lawn care returns nearly three times its cost. An outdoor kitchen returns roughly 60 cents per dollar. A pool in a cold climate may return nothing or less.

The 2023 Remodeling Impact Report: Outdoor Features is the only US dataset that does both halves of the sum. The National Association of Landscape Professionals (NALP) costs eleven specific projects at a specific size; the National Association of Realtors then asks its members what each one recovers at resale. Every percentage below is a dollar value divided by a dollar cost, for one defined job — not an estimate for a category.

That distinction is the whole article. "A patio returns 95%" is not a fact about patios. It is a fact about an 18-by-16-foot concrete paver patio, dry set over compacted gravel and sand, with paving material at $7 to $10 per square foot, costing $10,500 and recovering $10,000. Double the size, or specify natural flagstone, and you have left the dataset.

It is also widely mis-attributed. The report is NAR with NALP — not ASLA — and it is a different survey from Remodeling magazine's Cost vs. Value report, which uses different projects and different costs. Blending the two is how the "50–300%" range in circulation gets built.

Curb appeal operates through a different mechanism than appraised value. Rather than adding a discrete dollar amount to the appraisal, curb appeal shapes buyer psychology before they enter the house — influencing how generously they evaluate everything inside and how motivated they are to make a competitive offer.

The 5–11% figure everyone quotes is real, and it does not say what it is usually used to say. It comes from Behe et al. (2005) in the Journal of Environmental Horticulture (23(3):127–133): 1,323 volunteers across seven states were shown sixteen photographs of the same house front, landscaped to different standards, and asked what the home was worth. Perceived value rose 5–11% for a good landscape. That is an opinion about a photograph, not a recorded sale price — which makes it a good predictor of how a listing performs and a poor basis for a budget.

Inside that study there is a finding more useful than the range itself. The three variables were plant type, plant size and design sophistication, and their importance ran in that order, increasing: how the planting was arranged mattered more than how big it was, which mattered more than what it was. The smallest plants actively lowered perceived value, by 2.3%; the largest raised it 2.8%. Layout is the cheapest of the three to get right and the one that moves the number most.

Trees carry the only landscaping premium in this article that was measured on recorded sale prices rather than on opinions or on agent surveys, which makes it the most load-bearing number here.

Donovan and Butry (2010), a USDA Forest Service study published in Landscape and Urban Planning, visited 3,479 single-family homes — every home sold in Portland, Oregon over a ten-month period — and fitted a hedonic price model to the sales. Street trees added $8,870 to sale price, which the authors note is 3.0% of the median, and reduced time on market by 1.7 days.

The part that matters for a budget is where the money lands. One street tree added $12,828 to the combined value of every house within 100 feet — more than it added to the house that owns it. The paper's own conclusion is that if street trees are left to individual homeowners there will be too few of them, because most of the benefit goes to the neighbours. The flip side is the useful bit: your street's existing trees are already in your sale price, and they cost you nothing.

These two get bracketed together in almost every ROI article, and in NAR's data they are opposites. One recovers 56% of its cost and is the best-loved project in the report; the other recovers 100% and is the least-loved. Deciding between them on a single "feature additions don't pay" rule gets it wrong whichever way you go.

Not all landscaping investment is value-neutral or positive. Some improvements actively narrow your buyer pool, create perceived maintenance obligations, or signal a highly personalised taste that doesn't translate to broad appeal. Understanding what to avoid is as important as knowing what to invest in.

Individual landscaping elements — a new walkway, a planted border, fresh mulch — add value in isolation. But the same elements, designed as a cohesive whole that relates to the architecture of the house, consistently generate stronger buyer response than the sum of their parts.

This is the one piece of received wisdom on the page that the research actually supports, and it supports it in order. In Behe et al.'s seven-state study the three variables tested were plant type, plant size and design sophistication, and their influence on perceived home value increased in exactly that sequence — arrangement beat size, size beat species. A $5,000 planting scheme that reads as intentional and proportional will out-perform a $10,000 collection of specimen plants that reads as uncoordinated, and that is a measured result rather than a designer's preference.

AI design tools have made high-quality landscape design accessible at every budget level. With Hadaa, you can generate photorealistic renders of your garden or front yard from a photo — testing design options, plant combinations, and hardscape choices before committing to installation. The render doubles as a contractor brief that ensures what gets built matches what you visualised.

For homeowners preparing to sell, a rendered design also gives agents and stagers a "before/after" visual that can be included in listing materials — showing buyers not just the current state but the finished potential of the space.