Autumn includes a whole list of exterior property maintenance items with it. To make your Carolina Beach rental property’s yard and exterior ready for winter, you may like to take a look at the lawn to make certain, at any rate, whether it necessitates being dethatched, leaves cleaned up, and trees and plants made ready to weather the cold temperatures.
Tenants do a lot of the cleaning and even some repairs for a rental home. They live in the house so they are the ones first affected by it. This means that they have a big part in taking care of a rental property. However, there are some things that shouldn’t be done by them. Things that may require greater technical know-how or things that come with relatively high risk. For these tasks, the convenience of having the tenants do the work is not worth it. Therefore, with regards to seasonal yard maintenance, there are few assignments that should not be a tenant’s responsibility. Regardless if you necessitate seeing to it that the task is performed well, or the assignment would place your tenant’s welfare in danger, these kinds of maintenance affairs are better managed by those who know how to execute them appropriately and securely.
A rental property’s lawn is a significant element of the total appeal and value of the home. Frequent lawn maintenance should be a prerogative for both you and your tenant, as should other seasonal lawn maintenance tasks such as aerating and dethatching. Over the years, the soil underneath a lawn will get compacted with dead grass and other debris. This collected material is called thatch. While a healthy lawn will benefit from a little bit of organic material, when thatch builds up too much it can prevent water and essential nutrients from penetrating the ground and reaching the roots of your grass. This can make the lawn turn brown and stop growing, immediately resulting in a landscaping eyesore. But once you take away the thatch, you help the grass thicken up and grow stronger— making them less susceptible to disease. Reducing thatch levels also allows more water, air, and nutrients to reach the roots of your plants.
There are two ways to address the thatch problem: dethatching or power raking and aerating. For smaller lawn sites, it is recommended to remove thatch with a dethatching rake. The tines of the rake are intended to uproot the thatch upward, loosening it and separating it from the soil. To dethatch a lawn by hand, the lawn should be mowed to half of its normal height and then raked thoroughly. The loosened thatch can then be removed with your next mowing. To aerate a small lawn, you can rent an aerator machine that will remove small plugs of soil.
If, in any case, you are thinking about carrying this out yourself, see to it that you clearly mark all sprinkler heads or utility lines so you don’t run over and damage them. You’ll, likewise, be required to abide by the directions very carefully to make certain that the aerator doesn’t damage your lawn in the process. There are, likewise, professionals who give these services that you may wish to check with.
Obviously, if your rental property has a larger yard, these practices will be terribly stressful and require time-consuming to work on yourself. You could rent a dethatching or power raking machine to help with that task, but the same with aerating, you’ll have to be wary as to not to damage your irrigation system or other areas of the yard. Lawns that have been aerated or dethatched must, as such, be managed with utmost care henceforth, or you risk more destruction. Proper watering and fertilizing are steps that should be taken after a dethatching or aeration, to both protect your lawn and encourage the roots to grow.
Even though your tenant may actually be proficient, it is not a good idea to expect them to perform dethatching or aeration on your property’s lawn. Just in case they don’t execute a very good job or don’t know anything of what they are actually doing, they could perhaps cause extensive damage to your rental home’s yard, irrigation system, even septic or other utility lines. The equipment required to perform these maintenance tasks is not one thing most tenants keep or will have utilized previously, extremely multiplying the possibilities that this will turn out badly and that they could even hurt themselves in the process.
Placing your tenant’s safety at risk is never an excellent idea, as it could lead to your being held liable for their pain and suffering. You could execute lawn maintenance on your property yourself, nevertheless, subject to the dimension of your rental home’s lawn, you might want to hire a professional company to show up and carry out these important lawn maintenance tasks for you.
Instead of spending your time on seasonal maintenance tasks, think of the benefits of employing Real Property Management Champion to look after them for you. As a real estate investor, your time is, in effect, money. Free up your time by selecting us to tend to your rental property for you. Our property maintenance services will see to it that important seasonal tasks are being executed frequently and correctly, keeping your Carolina Beach rental property in good shape year-round. To know more, contact us online or call us at 910-782-4488 today.
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