The hidden ROI of commercial landscaping: What business owners miss
When business owners think about property investment, the conversation tends to start and end with the building. Square footage, energy rating, lease terms, interior fit-out. The external space, if it gets considered at all, is usually an afterthought. Tidy it up. Keep it clean. Maybe add a few planters by the entrance.
That framing leaves real money on the table.
The financial case for investing in external commercial space is more substantial than most owners realise, and it operates across several different channels: asset value, staff retention, client perception, and lease negotiability. None of these are marginal effects. Together, they make external landscaping one of the more overlooked items on a commercial property investment checklist.
The challenge is that the return is not always immediate or easy to attribute. Unlike a roof repair, a landscaped car park does not show up neatly in a maintenance log. So it tends not to get prioritised. That is a miscalculation, and a fairly common one.
What external space does to asset value
The evidence on landscaping and commercial property value is consistent, if not always widely cited in finance circles.
Research published by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has found that well-maintained and purposefully designed external spaces contribute positively to commercial property valuations, with the effect most pronounced in competitive letting markets where occupier choice is high. The mechanism is straightforward: tenants can choose between comparable buildings, and external presentation is part of what drives that choice. A building with a considered external environment lets faster and at a higher rate than a comparable building with neglected or purely functional external space.
For owner-occupiers, the same logic applies at point of sale. A commercial property with professionally landscaped grounds presents better in marketing, attracts more interest at valuation, and tends to sell in a shorter timeframe. The investment required to achieve that standard is almost always a fraction of the value uplift it generates.
The numbers vary by sector and location, but the principle is consistent. External space that reads as maintained and considered is an asset. External space that reads as neglected or accidental is a liability, even when the building itself is in good condition.
The staff retention angle businesses underestimate
Here is where the financial case for external space gets less obvious but arguably more significant.
Staff recruitment and retention is among the largest operational costs for most UK businesses. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development estimates that the average cost of replacing an employee in the UK sits between £3,000 and £12,000, depending on seniority and sector, when recruitment fees, onboarding time, and lost productivity are included. That figure rises sharply for specialist or senior roles.
The quality of a working environment, including the external environment, affects how people feel about coming to work. This is not a soft concern. Research by the World Green Building Council has linked access to green space and well-designed outdoor areas at workplaces to measurable improvements in reported wellbeing, productivity, and intention to stay with an employer. The effect is strongest in office and professional services environments, but it applies across sectors.
A business premises with usable outdoor space, somewhere staff can take a break away from their desks, eat lunch in good weather, or simply move through an environment that is not grey tarmac and a chain-link fence, is a more attractive place to work. That attractiveness has a financial value, even if it does not appear on a balance sheet.
For businesses competing for skilled staff in a tight labour market, the external environment of their premises is part of the employment proposition. Most businesses do not think about it that way. The ones that do have a modest but real advantage.
Client perception and first impressions
The first physical impression a client or visitor forms of a business happens before they enter the building.
Arrival experience shapes expectations. A client visiting a professional services firm, a manufacturing facility, or a premium retail or hospitality operation will have formed a view of the business before they reach reception. That view is based on what the external environment communicates: care, investment, attention to detail, or the absence of these things.
This is not purely about aesthetics. It is about what the external space signals about how the business operates. A landscaped entrance with clean surfaces, considered planting, and maintained hard landscaping communicates that the business sweats the details. A cracked tarmac car park with weeds growing through the joints communicates something different.
For businesses where the client relationship is high-value, where the deal size or contract value is significant, this signal matters. It is not the only thing that matters, but it is part of the picture a client assembles before any formal presentation or proposal is discussed.
Commercial landscaping contractors who work in this space, such as MacColl & Stokes Landscaping, are increasingly being engaged not just for maintenance but for considered redesigns of commercial external spaces, with briefs that are explicitly about client-facing presentation as much as practical function. That shift in how the brief is framed reflects a growing awareness among business owners that external space is a business asset, not just a maintenance liability.
What it costs and how to think about the return
Commercial landscaping investment ranges considerably depending on the scope of work. A basic refresh of an existing external space, new planting, resurfaced paths, updated entrance treatment, might cost between £15,000 and £40,000 for a mid-sized commercial premises. A full redesign involving hard landscaping, drainage, planting schemes, and external seating areas can run to £80,000 or more for larger sites.
Those numbers need to be assessed against what they are buying, not treated as a cost in isolation.
If a landscaping investment contributes to a valuation uplift of £50,000 on a commercial property worth £800,000, it has more than paid for itself before any other benefit is counted. If it meaningfully improves staff retention even by one fewer departure per year in a sector where replacement costs run to £8,000 a head, it recovers a significant proportion of its cost annually. If it contributes to winning one additional client engagement in a business where average contract value is substantial, the return on investment is clear.
The difficulty is that none of these benefits are guaranteed, and they are difficult to isolate as directly caused by a landscaping investment. But the same is true of a rebrand, a website redesign, or an office refurbishment. Businesses make those investments regularly on the basis of reasonable expectation rather than guaranteed return. External space investment deserves the same analytical framing.
Planning and phasing for businesses
One practical consideration for businesses is that commercial landscaping does not have to be done all at once.
A phased approach, starting with the highest-visibility areas, the entrance, the client-facing frontage, the areas seen from meeting rooms, and addressing secondary areas in subsequent phases, allows the investment to be spread across financial years. This matters for businesses managing capital allocation carefully, particularly in the current environment where lending conditions for commercial property improvement have tightened.
Asset finance and commercial loans are increasingly used to fund external property improvements of this kind, with lenders recognising that quality external presentation supports both the borrower’s business case and the underlying asset value. It is worth discussing with a commercial finance provider whether a landscaping investment of meaningful scale qualifies under their property improvement facilities.
The phased model also allows a business to assess the effect of the initial investment before committing to the full scope. Entrance and car park improvements, completed first, give a clear sense of the impact on arrival experience and stakeholder perception before the larger investment decisions are made.
The businesses most likely to see ROI
Not every business will see the same return from external landscaping investment. The effect is strongest where some specific conditions apply.
Client-facing businesses with high footfall or regular site visits from clients or prospects have the most direct return on improved external presentation. Professional services, healthcare, hospitality, premium retail, and high-value manufacturing all sit in this category.
Businesses in competitive letting markets, where they are either a landlord seeking to attract tenants or an occupier seeking to negotiate favourable lease terms, benefit from the valuation and occupier appeal effects.
Businesses competing in tight labour markets for specialist or professional staff benefit from the workplace environment effects.
And businesses with a long ownership horizon, where the investment has time to compound through maintained value and recurring commercial benefits, will see a stronger cumulative return than those looking at a short-term property hold.
None of this is complicated analysis. It is the same thinking applied to external space that businesses already apply to interior fit-out, technology infrastructure, and brand presentation. The gap is simply that external space has not traditionally been included in the same conversation. Increasingly, it is.