What I Learned About Home Ownership Costs: The Treetop View

Trees need to be trimmed, and large trees are expensive to trim. Further, large trees can usually only be trimmed by a crew using expensive equipment. Large trees with diseases or infestations require expensive care. Established neighborhoods, like those in Glendale and Pasadena, have lots of homes with mature landscaping and large trees.

These facts hit me only after I moved into my current home, and I offer them to the Redfin Forum first time home buyer who posted here and asked for advice about “the complete financial picture of home ownership.” There are plenty of replies dealing with the current market, taxes, insurance, and investment formulas, so check those out. I’m giving advice here only on the facts I learned above. Careful readers have probably already noted that the word ‘expensive’ appears in each of the first three sentences of this post.

A huge camphor tree, whose trunk took up the width of the parkway, offered plenty of morning shade in the front yard of our first home. Of course, parkway trees in Glendale are a city responsibility, so the branches never concerned us.

We sold that home (story for another time), and our current home has plenty of afternoon shade, but it comes from four large trees in our back yard.

Shortly after we bought the house, my husband and I invited a contractor friend to evaluate the driveway and garage. I remember our friend commenting on the trees: he said he liked to tell clients that even Bill Gates couldn’t buy a mature shade tree planted in just the right spot – it had to have been there for decades.

Perhaps Bill Gates couldn’t buy the tree, but he could certainly afford to have it trimmed as often as needed. Within a year, extended branches on two of the trees, which the previous owners had ignored, were encroaching on the open space in our yard. Both trees are at least 30 feet high, and some branches were weighed down almost to the ground. The total trimming bill, as I recall (and this was back in the year 2000) was $750 for all four trees, and yes, I think I did shop around.

When the crew finished I looked at the bare upper branches of two of the trees and wondered if they would ever thrive again. But Brazilian Pepper trees (classified as a weed in Florida, I learned) grow back quite quickly, and within two years we called for estimates again.

This time around, we were also concerned about the white sticky weblike material draped over much of the leaves, and the small gnat-like white insects flying around our faces in the back yard. This was a whitefly infestation, we were told, and we got a referral to an agricultural specialist. The total bill for tree injections (which actually did solve the problem and it has been at least 6 years now) was over $300. Of course we paid for another round of tree trimming at that time.

There was another round after that. And now I think we need to call for estimates again. I’ll have more warnings for first time home buyers about landscaping and tree issues in upcoming posts. For today, I’ll conclude: be sure to add in the costs of maintaining the living structures on your property as well as the built ones.