Perth’s median house sale price rose 16.4 per cent to $786,000 over the 2024-25 financial year, according to REIWA, with properties selling in a median of eight days.

In a market this competitive, the gap between a well-presented outdoor space and a bare concrete slab is not cosmetic. It is financial.

Most homeowners weighing up a landscaping investment think about it in terms of lifestyle. Will we use the pool? Will we entertain more? Will the kids have space? Those questions matter.

But they sidestep the harder one: what does a professionally designed and constructed outdoor area actually do to your property’s valuation, and what return can you realistically expect when you sell?

THE MISTAKES MOST SELLERS ONLY NOTICE TOO LATE

We have all seen it. A well-built home, newly painted, in a sought-after suburb, with an updated kitchen and polished timber floors goes to market and gets a lot of buyer interest. Then the agent opens the sliding door.

A concrete slab, a strip of patchy lawn and a Hills Hoist well past its use-by date. The offers arrive lower than projected and the negotiation is more difficult than it should be. It is not hard to understand the gap between expectation and result.

Buyers aren’t simply buying a structure in Perth. They are purchasing a lifestyle, and few demographics in Australia are more attached to outdoor living.

This is a city where having a well designed backyard is not thought of as an extra luxury for the owner, but as a reasonable expectation.

When the outdoor space fails to deliver, buyers don’t treat it as a minor issue. They take it as a bargaining tool. The frustrating part for sellers, of course, is that the indoor work doesn’t simply disappear in value.

The cost just gets discounted against the outdoor shortfall. But buyers mentally subtract what their backyard repairs will cost plus a buffer for the inconvenience, and that calculation almost never does the seller any favours.

The sellers who feel that gap most keenly are almost exclusively the ones who left the backyard as an issue to be solved, and this almost invariably becomes apparent the week the property goes to market.

WHAT THE NUMBERS ACTUALLY SHOW

​​Research commissioned by Hort Innovation, Australia’s national horticultural R&D body, found that about 40 per cent of surveyed real estate agents said that a well put together garden and lawn can add more than 20 per cent to a home’s value.

Nearly one-quarter of the agents said uplift can surpass 30 per cent. Using the data on Perth’s current median, a 20 per cent uplift equates to about $157,200 more value on the average home. That’s not just a lifestyle number; it shows up on the balance sheet.

On the conservative end, Australian sales data puts the outdoor investment return in the 10 to 20 per cent range. The 2025 Plant Value Report, produced by Greener Spaces Better Places in partnership with Domain, analysed real transaction data and found homes with established gardens sell for 17.4 per cent more nationally. This is not an estimate, but what buyers actually paid. At the conservative end of that range, a 10 per cent improvement on Perth’s median represents $78,600 in added value. Very few interior renovation categories can ever match it in dollar terms.

The opposite is equally revealing: A neglected garden can directly impact a property’s potential value by an estimated 5 to 15 per cent, real estate industry data tells us. Well-presented outdoor space can add 20 to 30 per cent to a property’s value according to agent surveys. The gap between the best and worst presented home on your street is substantial.

That range means outdoor space is among the strongest financial levers a Perth homeowner has.

THE FEATURES PERTH BUYERS ACTUALLY PAY FOR

Not all outdoor investment is equal at valuation time and we need to be honest about that. A flower bed and fresh mulch will also increase kerb appeal. A cohesively designed and properly constructed outdoor living environment shifts the price bracket. Understanding the distinction between them is what leads to the smartest investment decisions.

OUTDOOR ENTERTAINING AREAS AND ALFRESCO LIVING

Perth has more sunny days per year than almost any other Australian capital city overall, and that is not a lifestyle detail. It is a valuation argument. Buyers are actively seeking properties that let them live outdoors for most of the year and they pay a premium for spaces where that work is already done.

A well-planned alfresco area with high-quality paving, a pergola or roof structure, an outdoor kitchen and integrated lighting signals to buyers that the hard work is already done. An Australian sales study by OpenAgent reports that if a landscaped patio is done well and fits into the physical expression of a house, it adds around 12.4 per cent to a property’s value.

The reason that figure sticks is that alfresco entertaining space doesn’t simply provide a room. It provides usable hours, and buyers in a climate like Perth appreciate that intuitively.

When the outdoor kitchen extends naturally from the living room and the lighting and paving complement each other as one, buyers don’t look at the exterior as a feature. They are envisioning a lifestyle that they can embrace immediately.

POOLS AND THE INTEGRATION DIFFERENCE

The pool question is one that everybody asks, so let’s tackle it directly. A concrete pool installed without design intent can be a neutral or even slightly negative factor for buyers who perceive it as a maintenance liability. A pool integrated into an outdoor landscaped design is a different proposition.

This is the line of reasoning behind integrated pool landscaping and why sequencing design choices matter more than most clients initially realise. When a pool and landscape are resolved together from the start, the result is a complete outdoor room, not a series of sequential construction projects bolted together. That’s where a significant part of the valuation uplift comes from.

The buyers who bid a great deal for a pool property are not bidding on the pool alone. They’re looking at the whole picture: the paving around it, the planting that frames it, the shade structure that makes it usable on a 38-degree afternoon and the lighting that keeps it inviting after dark. Get that picture right and the numbers follow.

LOW-MAINTENANCE GARDENS AND WATER-EFFICIENT PLANTING

Perth buyers are increasingly incorporating the costs of ownership into their purchase decisions. A garden that can be beautiful but obviously requires hours of weekly labour and plenty of irrigation can close off a buyer market.

A garden built on native WA plants and adapted species with clever irrigation design does just the opposite. A drought-tolerant, low-maintenance planting is no passing design trend in Perth.

It is a rational design response that signals a lower ongoing cost of ownership to purchasers, which can broaden appeal to buyers and also protect the property’s value from dropping, given Perth’s water restrictions and extreme summer heat.

• Alfresco entertaining areas (paving, pergolas, built-in outdoor kitchen, integrated lighting) are estimated to contribute some 12.4 per cent to the property value.
• A pool’s return on investment depends heavily on context. The more cohesively it connects to the surrounding landscape design, the stronger the buyer response and the higher the price it can command.
• Low-maintenance, water-efficient planting expands the pool of buyers because ongoing ownership costs are lower.
• Design sequencing is important: designing the pool and landscape together from the outset can create a single, cohesive result with integrated effects that buyers will pay a premium for.

The thread running through all three is the order in which decisions are made. Pool, landscape, planting and entertaining areas that were resolved simultaneously as a single design exercise create space that looks and feels like a cohesive whole rather than a series of disconnected projects that have been bolted together over time.

Buyers subconsciously understand that contrast. Retrofitting a landscape around an existing pool almost always costs more and yields less than getting both right from the beginning.

WHY THE PERTH MARKET AMPLIFIES THESE RETURNS

REIWA data confirms Perth’s property market continues to face limited housing supply, with strong buyer demand and properties selling faster than almost anywhere else in the country. In a market where buyer competition is the norm, the difference between comparable properties is not minor. It is everything.

Two comparable homes on the same street will not sell for the same price if one has a professionally executed outdoor space and one does not. Perth’s love of outdoor living means the outdoor area carries disproportionate weight in buyer perception compared to most other Australian capital city markets, and that is something we can quantify.

Multiple competing offers push sale prices above the asking range, and multiple offers are what quality presentation generates. A buyer who drives up to a property and sees a resort-standard outdoor area does not open the negotiation the same way they open it for a property with a patchy lawn and nothing beyond the back door.

Population growth remains strong across WA, new housing supply continues to lag demand and the state’s economic fundamentals show no sign of softening. That kind of market rewards properties that give buyers less room to negotiate, and a well-designed, properly constructed outdoor space is one of the most effective tools for achieving exactly that.

THE CASE FOR DOING IT ONCE, AND DOING IT PROPERLY

There’s a version of this conversation that gets into small improvements: re-lay the lawn, add some screening plants, repaint the back fence. Those things have their place. For Perth homeowners who are genuinely serious about the property value question, however, a more productive conversation is around integrated design quality.

The reason is the integrated effect. A residential landscaping project that resolves hardscape (paving and structures) and softscape (planting and garden beds), pool, outdoor kitchen and lighting as a single design exercise generates a finished result where the whole reads as considerably greater than the sum of its parts.

Buyers instinctively recognise that kind of considered, finished quality, and they pay accordingly. Principal Pools and Landscapes has been building these kinds of spaces in Perth since 2007, holding multi-award-winning status under both the Swimming Pool and Spa Association (SPASA) and the Landscape Industries Association of WA (LIAWA).

The approach of conducting every site consultation personally, listening carefully to the client brief and resolving pool and outdoor design together in a single integrated process is exactly the approach the market rewards when it comes time to sell.

Clients who have lived with the result put it better than any data point can.

Darren and Susanne Ross, who commissioned a major backyard transformation with Principal, put it this way: “Yes, we get to enjoy it for many years to come, but you created something from nothing. We love the outdoors now and our functioning backyard that has actually brought our family closer together.”

That emotional connection to a space is precisely what drives buyer competition when a property eventually comes to market. Buyers are not bidding on square metres and build quality alone. They are bidding on the life they imagine living there.

THE INVESTMENT QUESTION, ANSWERED PROPERLY

If you are still approaching the landscaping decision primarily as a lifestyle consideration, run the numbers against your property’s current value. At a conservative 10 per cent return, a well-designed outdoor transformation on a median-priced Perth home returns more in attributable value than the cost of most projects. At the upper end of what the evidence supports, the financial case is compelling.

The key question for homeowners weighing a pool project is this: are you designing the pool and the outdoor space together, or are you planning to address the landscape afterwards? Our guide to creating a resort-style pool and landscape covers exactly why the sequencing of that decision makes such a significant difference to both the quality of the result and the return when you sell.

Professional landscaping adds value to Perth homes. The difference is in the standard of the design, how well it’s executed and the credentials of the team doing the work.

Which outdoor feature do you believe carries the most weight with buyers in your suburb right now: the entertaining area, the pool or the garden presentation?

Call us to talk through what the numbers look like for your specific property