LANDSCAPING
LANDSCAPING: THE PLOT THICKENS
Krystal Williams, managing director of Pavestone UK, spoke to Will McGill about the landscaping industry and the challenges it faces.
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t is estimated that around 87% of British homes have a garden, equalling around 23 million outdoor spaces, and in 2021 £18.6 billion was spent on gardens – this means that the average was around £690 per adult. It is also reported by Foxton that 92% of those looking to buy a home consider access to a garden or outside space to be the most essential factor, and that having access to a garden is now at the top of people’s agendas when they are looking to buy. If anything, the data suggests that having a garden is seen as being far more advantagous than it would have been pre-pandemic. “I think it is more to do with people having
more confidence and being happy to spend money on their own homes. I think if you look at the consumer confidence index that is just going up, up until a few months ago. Things seemed to be quite happy for a while. I think this whole sentiment of “everything is terrible, everyone is miserable and nobody can afford to do anything” did not seem quite true. People were still able to afford to go on holidays and it was not that horrific for people,” says Krystal Williams who is managing director at Pavestone UK.
Weather-driven work She continues: “Landscapers were busy, the weather was also quite nice at that point. So, people were in their gardens a bit more and happier to do some more work to them.” Since then, the weather took a turn for the worse and has not quite recovered this summer - which is a very British way to describe every summer. Williams adds: “Our market tends to be better when the sun is shining, then landscaping tends to be good. They spend more time in their garden and they think they need to sort their gardens out. What we are seeing now is because there is a huge pinch on spending and peoples’ finances, due to perhaps losing their jobs. People who
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are struggling have become landscapers again or odd job builders, I have had lots of leaflets through my door asking, as have many others, asking if they can do my weeding or cut my grass or clean my driveway.
“These people tend not to know the market and they do not understand the price points, meaning that a lot of them just undercut the true professional landscapers. “This is what is causing some of the problems now, there is this battle between odd job builders and professional landscapers because the price between the two is vast.
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net September 2023
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