Got a Rotten Neighbor? Mow Their Lawn
What can you do to keep your home’s value from falling as home prices drop and the foreclosure virus spreads across the U.S.? Be a good neighbor, suggests June Fletcher in today’s Journal.
Because the quality of your neighborhood affects home buyers’ perceptions of your own house and the price they’d be willing to pay for it, it helps in the long run to keep up the appearance of your home – and your neighbors’ — despite today’s tough economic conditions, she writes.
That means paying to keep your own home repaired, but also chipping in, if needed, to make neighboring houses look spiffy, too, she says. So, if your neighbor can’t afford to fix that decrepit fence or to repair a cracked walkway, consider chipping in yourself or pooling a fund together with other neighbors to help out. Or, if the grass is several feet high on the foreclosed property down the block, mow it yourself — if the lender doesn’t mind.
Which brings to mind a Web site that we recently came across — RottenNeighbor.com where visitors mostly gripe about their bad neighbors. To wit, one poster writing about a house in Cascade-Fairwood, Wash., complains: “In the winter, yard waste piled on top of each other on the front lawn. In the summer, the front lawn grows longer than the rain forest. Of course there’s the garbage in the driveway. Please clean up your property already!”
A few posts are positive, like this one about neighbors in Conway, Fla.: “Always ready to lend a hand with anything you need — keep the common area at the end of the street pristine. Yard is always perfect and they are quiet and nice people - happy to live near them.”
Of course we don’t know who is posting and what their motivation is, but one does get the sense that the quality of one’s neighbors and neighborhood really do play into how the value of one’s home is perceived. Readers, how do your neighbors impact your quality of life? Do you get a sense that they impact the value of your home? — Lauren Baier Kim
