How Pests Decrease The Value Of Your Home
Pests can decrease the value of your home and with relatively little effort on the pests part. Pests cause billions of dollars in damages worldwide every year from agricultural damages to property damages. You’ll actually both save yourself money and increase the value of your home in the long run with preventative pest control.
It’s pretty simple when you break it down; All homes are valued based on everything used to build your home to what’s planted outside of it within your property line. This includes everything from the tile in your bathroom to the insulation in your walls to the sprinkler system for your lawn to the trees and shrubs scattered throughout your yard. All of these have an individual value that when combined together, make up the total value of your home.
The Value of Landscaping
Some trees and shrubs may have value. For example a 100-year old oak tree, a tree of that age and type can typically add upwards of $50,000 or more to your property value. This is an extremely important factor to consider as a homeowner. The smart thing to do with an asset like that is ensure the trees safety from both disease and pests via a botanist and pest specialist respectively. The last thing you’d want is for that 100-year old oak tree to slowly wither away from a preventable disease or come crashing down due to termite damage, potentially on another structure, devaluing your home further.
Pests can decrease the value of a home by ruining your valuable vegetation!
Pests Can Destroy Other Backyard Property
If you don’t have trees anywhere on your property, pests can decrease the value of your home in other ways. Perhaps you have a deck extending from the home and into the yard. Whether you built it yourself or paid someone to do it, you undoubtedly paid for the material used to make it, primarily the wood planks 90% of all decks use.
Pests can decrease the value of a home by destroying your deck and siding.
Assuming the deck is up to code, simply having it adds value to the home. But consider a deck that is poorly maintained and suffering from damage due to carpenter ants slowly chipping away at the supports underneath to make their nests. A deck in such condition is not worth anything, plus it’s also likely a hazard.
Any potential buyer will consider an addition in a state of disrepair, a devaluation to your house. Any structure dilapidated by pests will either need to be repaired or removed.
How Pests Damage Your Interior
If you have no deck or trees or anything of value in your yard (we didn’t even mention the condition of your yard also contributes to your home’s overall value), we can look further still into the home to see just how pests can devalue the interior. Remember, all homes are valued based on what’s inside and out. If you’re covered on the outside, it’s time to look inside.
For example, cockroaches are a pest found in literally every corner of the world and without question one of the hardest to kill and/or get rid of. The mere sight of a cockroach can immediately devalue your house 10% for a handful of reasons. Not only would the potential buyer have to pay to get them removed if you did not, having them is a health hazard due to the diseases they can carry and spread. And unfortunately this isn’t isolated to just cockroaches, but all pests, since all pests are capable of causing damages in some form or another.
Silverfish and moths eat paper material, mice leave droppings everywhere and often steal food – ruining entire food stores, spiders bite, millipedes usually die in corners or baseboards, are unsightly to see and venomous the larger they are, ants, bed bugs, are also known to bite, etcetera.
In all cases, pests will never add to the value of the home and will only take away from it’s worth and rather quickly at that if left unchecked.
Pests can decrease the value of a home by being unsightly, spreading disease, causing health hazards, as well as damaging the structural integrity of the home itself endangering its occupants.
Luckily, even general pest control services can prevent the types of pest behavior that ultimately decreases the value of a home. We highly recommended using either our services or another pest company at least a few times a year to ensure your property as well as its occupants remain safe and protected.
New To MasterGuard? Fill Out The Form Below And We'll Be In Touch Right Away!
