Archive for month: May, 2015

Don’t underestimate the importance of a beautiful yard to home owners and their neighbors. 84 percent of adults say that the quality of a home’s landscape and yard would affect their decision on whether to purchase a home or not, according to a new survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by the National Association of Landscape Professionals.

The majority of Americans want to live amid nice landscaping. The survey found that 91 percent of Americans believe it is important to live in close proximity to trees, grass, or nice landscaping. Midwesterners are the most likely to rate the importance of landscaping the highest (at 94%), followed by the West (89%) and Northeast (87%).

“Across the board, the survey reveals that Americans deeply value surrounding natural elements and yards where they can spend time outside their homes,” according to the National Association of Landscape Professionals.

Eighty-four percent of home owners surveyed said that it is important to have their yard well-maintained, and 71 percent also say it’s important for their neighbors to have well-maintained landscapes as well. But the survey finds that only 33 percent of Americans say they believe they have the knowledge and skills to keep their lawn and plants healthy and appealing.

Home ownership can lead to higher levels of well-being, according to data from the OECD Better Life Index, which gauges the quality of life worldwide by factoring in such things like housing, jobs, civic engagement, health and safety.

The heightened sense of happiness that comes from home ownership may be more than just getting a new home but more closely tied to the basic need for shelter, says Aida Caldera Sanchez and Caroline Tassot, authors of an analysis about the index. Also, home ownership can lead to status and independence – qualities that often are linked to happiness, their analysis shows.

On the well-being index, housing outperformed all the all other indicators monitored – like education, safety, and environment – by the highest amount in the Midwest, with 75 percent of the states ranking housing as most important to happiness. In the South, housing tops all other indicators in 70.6 percent of the states, and in the West housing was tops in only 15 percent of the states compared to the other indicators.

View how housing stacks up in your area at the OCED Regional Well-being website.

Source: OCED Regional Well-being and “Homeownership Linked to Happiness,”