A mature tree increases a home’s value by 7 to 19 percent, worth far more than the savings in costs of removing it when building. By Aakash Gupta, in the US but clearly applicable in Australia.
Let me explain exactly why every new subdivision in America looks like the top photo …
A mature tree increases a home’s value by 7 to 19 percent. On a $400,000 house, that’s $28,000 to $76,000.
A single shade tree produces the cooling equivalent of ten room-size air conditioners running 20 hours a day. One tree on the west side of a house cuts energy bills by 12 percent within 15 years. …
Removing those trees saves the builder roughly $5,000 per lot. Concrete trucks need twice the dripline radius of every standing tree. Utility trenches need flat ground. A bulldozer flattens 200 lots in an afternoon. Preserving trees adds weeks and thousands per home.
So the developer pockets $5,000 in savings and the buyer eats $50,000 in lost value for the next two decades. The person making the decision and the person paying for it have never been in the same room. …
Fifty years of data. The trees are worth more than removing them saves.
Developers clear-cut anyway because they sell the house once and leave. You live in it for 30 years.
Example:
[Developer] George Mitchell bought 28,000 acres of Houston timberland in 1974 and preserved 28% as permanent green space. He forced McDonald’s to build behind the tree canopy. That McDonald’s became one of the highest-volume locations in Texas. The first office building, designed to reflect the surrounding forest so you couldn’t see it from the street, leased completely.
The Woodlands median home price today: $615,000. Katy, a comparable Houston suburb that clear-cut: $375,000. Named #1 community to live in America two years running.
We have a couple of large trees, the only ones for several houses in every direction, in Perth. It is noticeably much cooler in summer under our trees than anywhere else up and down the street.
David Archibald:
All of Perth’s new suburbs have been clear-felled, with the new lots not having enough room for trees or on the footpaths.
So pay up for aircon or swelter.