Landlord Hedge Care
The hedges at your let properties cut on a schedule, photographed before and after, and invoiced without you or your agent ever needing to be there.
Nobody at a let property owns the hedge
The tenant assumes the landlord deals with the boundary. The landlord assumes the tenancy agreement makes the garden the tenant's responsibility. The agent only sees the property at inspection, and a hedge grows quietly for two years between those visits without anybody deciding anything about it.
Then it becomes a problem all at once. The hedge is over the pavement and the council has written. The neighbour has complained about light. The tenant is leaving and the garden is in a state that is now an argument about the deposit. All of it started as an ordinary trim that nobody booked.
Landlord Hedge Care removes the question of whose job it is. The hedge has a schedule, the schedule is ours to keep, and the record shows what was done and when.
Access, notice and nobody waiting in
- Tenant contact, onceYou give us the tenant's name and mobile number at set-up and confirm they are expecting us. From then on we deal with them directly about timing.
- Notice before we comeThe tenant hears from us in advance of the visit, not on the doorstep. Most people want to move a car, bring the washing in or shut a cat indoors.
- Usually no key neededWhere the hedge is reachable from the garden or the front, we work whether anybody is home or not. We only need somebody in when access runs through the house.
- Gates and petsGates closed and latched before we leave, every time, as point eight of the Kent Hedge Standard. If there is a dog, we ask for it to be inside while blades are running.
- No access, no chargeIf we cannot get in, you hear the same day and we offer the next date. Nothing is invoiced for a visit that did not happen.
- Left as we found itPaths, drives and lawns cleared, clippings blown out of the hedge, green waste removed and disposed of responsibly.
Photographs for the property file
Every visit is photographed before the first cut and again when the work is finished, from the same positions each time. Those photographs go on the record for that address and come to you after the visit.
This is the part landlords tell us they actually want. A dated set of images showing the boundary in reasonable order at a known point in the tenancy is worth having long before anybody needs it. If a garden clause is ever disputed at check-out, the file already shows the state of the hedge through the tenancy rather than one photograph taken on the day of the argument. If a neighbour claims the hedge has been neglected for years, the same file answers it.
It also makes each cut better than the last. The person on the next visit can see what the hedge looked like six months ago, what was taken off, and where the lines were set. That is the difference between a maintained hedge and one that gets a different opinion imposed on it every year.
The three that generate letters
Footpaths. A hedge growing out over a public footway is the owner's responsibility, and a local authority can require it to be cut back. At a let property the letter arrives at the address, the tenant may or may not forward it, and the first you hear can be a formal notice. Two visits a year on a vigorous privet or laurel frontage keeps that conversation from ever starting.
Light and outlook. Complaints about a tall evergreen boundary blocking a neighbour's light are common, and they escalate slowly and expensively. A leylandii or western red cedar screen held at a sensible height by regular conifer care never gets to the point of a formal complaint. One that has been left for five years usually needs a proper reduction before a schedule makes sense.
Deposits. Garden condition at check-out is one of the most common deposit disagreements, and a boundary hedge is the most visible part of a garden. Where the hedge is maintained on your instruction and documented on your file, it stops being a variable in that conversation at all.
HedgeCare does the remembering
Landlord Hedge Care is HedgeCare applied to property you do not live at. We inspect the hedge once, set its cycle by species and condition, put the visits in the diary for the year, and remind both you and the tenant before each one. The Annual Hedge Plan is the schedule itself: one, two or three visits a year at a price agreed in advance.
You do not track it. You do not diarise it. You do not get a call in August from a tenant about a hedge you last thought about in March.
One property or forty
Invoicing goes whichever way suits your accounting. Per property, itemised and dated, where costs are held against individual addresses or recharged. Or one consolidated invoice per visit period across the whole portfolio, broken down by address so it reconciles line by line against your own schedule.
Where a portfolio is being worked, we group addresses geographically and take them in runs. That is how the timing stays predictable across a whole set of properties rather than drifting a week at a time.
The natural rhythm is to set the hedge cycle alongside your inventory and periodic inspection cycle. If a property is inspected every six months, a two-visit hedge schedule lands in the same seasons, and the inspector arrives at a boundary that has just been cut rather than one that needs a note in the report. Where a hedge has been left long enough that a routine visit will not fix it, we quote Hedge Rescue or Hedge Removal separately, and tell you which one the hedge honestly needs.
Asked by every new portfolio
Does the landlord or agent need to attend the visit?
No. Access is arranged directly with the tenant once you have given us their contact details and confirmed they are expecting us. Most hedges are reached from the garden alone, so a key is rarely needed. If nobody is in and the garden can be reached without going through the house, we carry on and work as normal.
What happens if the tenant refuses access?
We do not press the point. We leave, tell you the same day, and offer the next available date. Nothing is charged for a visit we could not carry out, and the missed visit stays on the property record so the reason is documented if it becomes relevant later.
Can you cut a hedge that is causing a complaint from the neighbour?
Yes, where the hedge is on your boundary. We cut your side of a shared hedge to the boundary line and no further without the neighbour's agreement, and we will tell you plainly if the overhang your neighbour is complaining about sits on their side and needs a conversation rather than a trimmer.
How is the work invoiced across several properties?
Either way. Per property, if the cost is being recharged or accounted for separately, or one consolidated invoice covering every address visited in the period, itemised by property so it reconciles against your own records.
£1 million public liability insurance is held for all work we carry out, at let and owner occupied property alike. Nesting bird checks are made before every job under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and where an active nest is found in the main season, roughly 1 March to 31 August, we work another face of the hedge or come back.
Send us your addresses
Give us the properties and a photograph of each hedge where you have one. We will come back with a cycle and a price per property, and take it from there.