Landscape lighting tips to help you sell your home

Landscape lighting tips to help you sell your home

By Mike Gambino

Selling a home is difficult right now, I don’t need to tell you that. The value of houses is lower and there is a lot of competition in the marketplace. However, it is possible to make your home appealing enough to find a buyer. Paying attention to your home’s landscape lighting is important for setting your house apart from the rest of the crowd and increasing the likelihood of a sale.

Why Lighting Matters

Does changing the lighting of a home really make a difference to buyers? Yes. Light has the power to flatter a space or make it unattractive. The right lighting can have a major impact on the aesthetic appeal of the home. A dark home looks dingy and unappealing. A home with glaring lighting feels harsh. A space with the right amount of accent lighting and ambient lighting is warm and inviting, something that buyers are definitely looking for. The right landscape lighting fixtures can also enhance the design of the home, making it more elegant or more contemporary.

Tips for Improving Existing Lighting

The first thing that you should do is to look at the lights outside the home that you want to keep. There are things that you can do to improve existing lights outside the home to make the house more interesting for buyers. Top tips include:

  • Make sure the landscaping is right for your lighting. You may have great ambient lighting but if your plants and trees are overgrown and in need of pruning then the light will get absorbed and the property will seem dark. Have the landscaping professionally pruned and detailed to enhance the value of your existing lighting.
  • Turn on the outdoor lighting at night when showing the home. Your existing lighting is important, there’s nothing better than a beautifully illuminated landscape. Make sure that you let it showcase as much of it as possible when showing off the home to potential buyers.
  • Clean all of your light fixtures and lenses. This allows the brightness of the lights to shine through and also makes the fixtures themselves more appealing. What a great cheap way to make it more likely that your home will sell quickly.
  • Check that all of the lights are working properly. A big mistake that homeowners’ make is that they forget the little details. A buyer who walks around a property after dark only to find that some fixtures don’t work is immediately turned off.
  • Listen to your lighting system. If a transformer is making a humming noise then they need to be serviced or replaced to increase the likelihood of not turning off a buyer and creating an obstacle to a sale.

Tips for Adding New Lighting

There will be some areas where you want to add new lighting to enhance the value of the home. Here are some tips for adding that important lighting:

  • Start with the front yard. Curb appeal is the most important part of getting a home to sell. Make sure that your home’s exterior is well lit with quality landscape lighting fixtures.
  • Replace outdated lantern style light fixtures. If you walk into a yard and the first thing that you see is an out-of-date light fixture then you’re going to look at the rest of the space with a bad taste in your mouth. Invest in upgrading the main light fixtures that get attention outside the home during daylight hours. Rusting and broken fixtures need replacing.
  • Replace light bulbs with fresh high quality constant color lamps not the cheap offshore stuff at your local home improvement store. Landscape lighting is terrific when you’re actually living in a space. However, when you’re looking at whole property to see if you want to live there, you need great ambient lighting. Many visible fixtures look like clutter to potential homebuyers and the wrong style of fixture can turn off buyers who would otherwise be interested in the home. Conceal fixtures so you see the effect and not the source in order to avoid this problem.
  • Update the lighting fixtures on the patio. This is one area where the task lighting is important. You should make sure that there’s adequate lighting for tables and BBQ grills. The fixtures should be in keeping with the style of the home. An impressive back yard patio can help clinch the sale of a home and lighting helps with that.
  • Retrofit LED lighting bulbs.This is a great little touch that appeals greatly to buyers, making it noticeable that you’ve really put some effort into making the house convenient and comfortable for them.

Have your landscape lighting specialist walk through your property to recommend lighting updates. They can provide you with an outside perspective as to whether any additional lighting changes should be made to make the home more appealing to buyers.

This landscape lighting blog is published by Mike Gambino of Gambino landscape lighting inc. all rights reserved. Mike is a professional landscape lighting system designer/ builder and has been designing, installing and maintaining landscape lighting systems for more than 20 years. Mike resides in the Los Angeles area with his wife and 2 sons. To visit his website go to www.gambinolighting.com . To inquire about hiring Mike please click here .

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