| Given the current economic conditions that we all find ourselves in, we have had numerous clients looking for significant savings throughout their retail centres.
Whilst we understand how important presentation is in attracting shoppers to your centre, we also appreciate that the tough economic conditions are forcing us all to look for ways to save. To assist with managing your budget and presentation of your centre, we have listed some of the ways we are assisting our clients to reduce the spend on their Landscape Management. Let our 30 years of experience with retail environments and delivering customer focused landscape presentation assist you in these tough times to attract more shoppers.
TIP 1 – Identify key areas and refine the maintenance budget Show you are open for business and still care. Focus maintenance on high traffic entrance ways, inviting shoppers to enter your centre and creating the impression that we are open for business. For ‘back of house’ areas and carpark areas maintenance consider reducing the maintenance regime, focussing purely on safety, vermin control and damage prevention. If the centre looks neglected especially in these times customers will look for a cleaner centre to shop at. Identify feature landscape elements that will be hard to replace or assist with identifying your brand. Talk to your landscape professionals to identify these elements and put a basic maintenance plan in place to ensure you don’t lose these key features, such as avenues of trees, feature palms or hedges that will be expensive to replace or will lose their appeal should they die out.
TIP 2 – Lawn Areas Lawn areas are the most forgiving and least likely to have any long-term effects by dropping service frequency. Whilst they will need a good tidy in time to clear weed infestations, these will be relatively easy to rectify. General grass areas can be dropped to minimal frequencies especially coming into the cooler months. Major entrances will need to be maintained for presentation.
Tip 3 – Safety and property damage Minimal maintenance areas such as carparks, ‘back of house’ areas and around closed retailers will need to focus on safety and property damage reduction. When servicing the high traffic areas the landscape team can inspect these minimal maintenance areas to ensure the landscape is safe. Ensuring Items such as security cameras have full visibility, vehicle and signage sight lines are maintained, vegetation and tree branches are cleared away from the building, reduced vermin nesting areas, and pathways are free from trip hazards, attending to issues only as they arise. Unfortunately, where youth are bored and people are experiencing economic woes we tend to notice an increase in vandalism, crime and insurance claims. Prevention is best.
Tip 4 Weeds Weeds are the quickest indication of a neglected garden, while easily rectified, following a period of minimal maintenance they can be attributed to bringing in pest and disease to the gardens and creating seed banks in the soil profile where weeds continually develop. Talk to your landscape professional about putting down pre-emergent weed applications before the minimal maintenance period, this should greatly reduce weed growth for the following few months.
Tip 5 – Indoor Plants Indoor plants are challenging and will really need an onsite consultation to ensure an effective solution is found. It is costly to remove and reinstate plants later, so it is best if an onsite solution can be found. If the indoor plants can be grouped and act as a screen for “closed” areas of a centre, they will retain the appearance of stronger trade and also reduce maintenance costs through less traversing of the centre for maintenance. Where centres are closed, can the plants be moved to one central location (out of sight) and maintained onsite.
If you need any help with your centre, please do not hesitate to reach out. With nearly 30 years experience in managing the presentation for retail centres, we will be able to provide you with some cost-effective ways of presenting your facility.  |
