The value of a property can be enhanced with some judicious plantings, whether it be a formal English garden with manicured hedges and dense layers of old-fashioned perennials, climbing roses and foxgloves or the trendy chaos method, where different flower, vegetable and herb seeds are mixed in a bucket and thrown onto some overturned soil and covered with mulch, and then seeing what grows. 

There are studies showing that an attractive landscape can increase the value of a home anywhere from five to 15 percent, and given the design mania around short-term rentals, it’s no surprise that there are multiple threads on Reddit and Airbnb community pages offering gardening advice.

For Adam Doolittle, who has a short-term rental cottage in Narrowsburg, N.Y., the plantings were all about the hummingbirds.

“I had a muddy hill after I put a pond in and the soil was eroding back into the pond so I needed a quick way to get the bank stable,” Doolittle told proptext. “I also read that hummingbirds eat mosquitoes. My grandma loved hummingbirds and had a china set with hummingbirds that my sister now owns.

“I figured it was the best way to solve several problems — stabilize a muddy mess and get hummingbirds around the pond so they could control the mosquitoes.” 

Not so fast. Narrowsburg, a quaint village along the Delaware River in the southern tier of New York’s Catskill region, is overrun with deer.

“The first year I didn’t know anything,” he said. “I planted a lot of different hummingbird favorites but I didn’t consider the deer. The deer devoured most of what I planted that year and the plants didn’t come back.” 

Doolittle did a bit more research and found out that deer did not like salvia and bee balm.

“This year I got smarter and planted hummingbird favorites that are also deer resistant. So far they’ve left all of it alone,” he said. “I’ve seen one hummingbird come back several times to feed on the flowers.”

Vrbo’s 2024 trend reporting highlighted growing traveler interest in outdoor amenities including “access to fruit trees or a vegetable patch,” alongside rising demand for farmhouses, barns, and rural stays.

What is deer resistant in New York’s Catskill region would not work well for a xeriscape desert-proof garden in Arizona, and fire-resistant plants native to California do not thrive in the heat and humidity of the South. Proptext recommends that budding horticulturists go to a good local garden center and talk to an experienced employee — the savings from shopping at a Home Depot or a Lowe’s may be ephemeral if the plants don’t last more than a year.

And those looking for a real bump in home value, or STR curb appeal, should seriously consider hiring a professional landscape designer.

In a survey conducted by Alex X. Niemiera, professor at the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Virginia Cooperative Extension, respondents ranked design sophistication as most important, plant size as next important, and diversity of plant type as least important.

The landscape favored by most of those surveyed called for a design with large deciduous, evergreen, annual flowers in a variety of color and stone, brick, concrete and wood as permanent features. (This survey was originally conducted in 1999, and was reviewed in 2023.)

A 1999 Michigan study found that plant size was the factor that most added to a home’s value (40.2 percent) and design sophistication was a close second (36.5 percent).

Upscale STR operators should consider fresh flowers along with the welcoming bottle of wine. Those with spaces that don’t get a lot of light should consider ferns, which don’t need much. The point is that a little greenery is better than none, and too much might not be worth the trouble.

Those operating in single-family residential space should look for low-maintenance and hardy plants. Perennials, as the name implies, come back year after year and the flowers are a welcoming sight for guests. Planting bulbs pays off as well in early spring, bringing a burst of color when the trees in Midwest and the Northeast are still awakening from the winter slumber.

Some 20 percent of Airbnb hosts have gardens and plant collections to complement their spaces. Gardening experts and hosts Maureen and Zdravko from California shared these tips from a community post:

But let’s not get bogged down with a checklist.

Certainly Bob Dash, a poet and painter who took a different approach to landscape design he began in 1967 for the acre and a half in Sagaponack, Long Island, known as Madoo. He believed in taking a seat, often in the middle of a field, and admiring the view.

“Bob would just mow paths through the meadows and put a bench down and just read his book, and probably have a drink,” Alejandro Saralegui, who has a new book, “Madoo: The Making of an American Garden.”

“There are lots of twisty, turny paths at Madoo,” Saralegui told The New York Times, “and that’s how they came about, because he literally was just pushing a mower. And then the following week or two, he would do it again, and you’d end up in a different spot with a different view.”

So whether you are trying to lure hummingbirds to eat mosquitoes or creating outdoor seating spaces where visitors can take a different view than what they would see on foot, let the plants do the talking.

Have a seat, have a look around, and smell the bee balm.

Berkshire Hathaway will acquire homebuilder Taylor Morrison for $6.8 billion and new CEO Greg Abel, who was chosen last year by company founder Warren Buffet to take over, hinted that he plans to join Taylor Morrison with Berkshire’s existing site-built homebuilding operations that are part of its Clayton Homes subsidiary. Clayton produces over 50,000 homes a year across its 40 facilities in the US, including off-site manufactured, modular, and CrossMod® homes and traditional site-built homes. Taylor Morrison, the sixth largest homebuilder in the country, delivered nearly 13,000 homes in 2025. The merger of Taylor Morrison’s operations with Clayton would be a departure for Berkshire, which generally takes a hands-off approach when it buys a company.

The Florida housing market is entering bear territory, and the combination of high costs of living and extreme weather do not bode well for the future. Data from Parcl Labs from June 2 found that 12% of Florida's for sale homes are in active fire sale territory, meaning they have been sitting on market, the seller has been reducing price and increasing the frequency of those price cuts. In Tampa and Fort Myers, fire sales now top 30% of listings in some submarkets.

“This means sellers cannot find buyers even though they want to,” Jason Lewis from Parcl Labs posted on LinkedIn. Florida’s median home price fell 3.1% in April from the same month last year, the largest decline of any state since 2012, according to data from Redfin Corp. Home inventory has reached near-record highs while the influx of new residents that buoyed the state has slowed dramatically.

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