Conducted by Harris Poll, the survey found that over the past year, 40 percent of Americans with a yard hired professionals to perform their lawn and landscape work.
The top services used over the past 12 months included:
- Mowing at 20 percent
- Tree care (e.g., tree fertilization, spraying, trimming, removal) at 20 percent
- Lawn pest control (e.g., chinch bugs, grubs, moles) at 17 percent
- Weed prevention and control at 16 percent
- Irrigation system management/repair at 13 percent
- Landscape maintenance (e.g., mulching, pruning, annual flower planting) at 13 percent
- Lawn aeration (i.e., removal of small cores of soil from the lawn) at 12 percent
- Major landscape installation and/or enhancements at 12 percent
- Landscape design at 11 percent
- Seeding/re-seeding at nine percent
- Other services at seven percent
The survey was commissioned as a benchmark to track consumers’ purchasing habits as it relates to lawn and landscape services. NALP says its Industry Growth Initiative is committed to growing the industry and its workforce, and they say it will measure its success against purchasing and hiring benchmarks.
NALP reports that other survey results include the fact that among those who have a landscape or lawn at their home, individuals who are married are more likely than unmarried ones to invest in lawn care or landscape maintenance services (45 percent versus 33 percent).
Studies found that 62 percent of those who didn’t hire a lawn/landscape professional in the past 12 months said the cost was too high, while 49 percent said they enjoyed caring for their lawns themselves. Forty-three percent believe their yard is fine just the way it is.
Fifty-two percent who did hire a professional said that doing so helped their lawn/landscape look better, 41 percent said they wanted to save time and 30 percent wanted to enjoy their yard more.
NALP says that this online survey was conducted within the United States by Poll on behalf of NALP. The survey was conducted among 1,721 adults 18 years and older who have a home with a lawn and landscape.
Another abbreviated survey was conducted online within the U.S. by Poll between Oct. 26-30, 2017 that included 1,594 adults ages 18 and above who have a home with a lawn/landscape. From this survey, it was determined a query on homeowners’ behaviors with the application of fertilizer to their lawns was inadvertently omitted from the original survey.
NALP says these surveys were not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.
