How to Bid an HOA Landscaping Contract

A residential customer buys a mow. An HOA buys the appearance of the whole community for a year, judged by several hundred residents who each believe they are the client. Four practical differences:

The scope includes things that aren't mowing. Beds, mulch, pruning, seasonal color, irrigation checks, common-area trash, stormwater basins and entry monuments all sit inside the contract, and they consume more hours than most landscapers estimate.

The decision is a vote. Your proposal is read aloud, compared to two others, and approved by volunteers. Clarity beats craft.

Communication is part of the deliverable. Boards renew vendors who answer emails and document completed work, and they replace vendors who do good work quietly.

It renews. One HOA won at the right price is a multi-year revenue base. See commercial landscaping contracts for how it sits alongside apartment and retail grounds work.

Walk the community with the manager or a board member and leave with all of this documented:

Measure in zones that match how you will actually route the crew. A single "6 acres" number hides the fact that half of it is open front lawn at high production rate and half is trimmed detail around eleven buildings at a third of that rate.

Get turf from a measured site plan or a mapping tool, then verify the tight areas on foot. Measure beds by linear edge and depth — bed edge length drives edging and hand-detail time more than area does. Sidewalk and trail linear footage drives edging and blowing. Count fixed obstacles: signs, hydrants, light poles, playground borders. Each one is a trim stop.

Then convert each zone to crew hours with your own production rates. If you don't have rates, time your next three properties by zone before you bid a community. Takeoff discipline is covered across trades in the commercial bid guide.

Define a "visit" in writing or you will be arguing about it in month three. A standard maintenance visit should state exactly which of these are included, and at what frequency:

Decide deliberately which of these live inside the base contract and which are separate. Mulch is the classic trap: a board hears "landscaping contract" and assumes annual mulch is included, while the landscaper priced mowing only. Put mulch in as a stated quantity — cubic yards installed, once per year, at a stated depth — or exclude it explicitly.

Fertilization and weed control frequently require a state pesticide applicator license. Confirm your status with your state agriculture department before you include chemical applications; the EPA's applicator certification directory lists the certifying agency for each state.

Irrigation is best structured as included inspections plus billable repairs — monthly zone checks in the base contract, parts and repair labor by work order.

Event-driven work does not belong in a fixed monthly fee. Price it as labeled add-ons with explicit trigger conditions: snow at a stated accumulation threshold with per-push or per-hour rates, storm cleanup at time and materials with a stated response window, and emergency call-out with an after-hours rate.

Boards appreciate this more than bundling, because it tells them exactly what a bad winter costs instead of surprising them with a change order.

Everything reduces to crew hours. Crew hours per visit = crew size × hours on site. Annual mowing labor = crew hours per visit × visits per year × fully burdened labor cost.

Bed maintenance is calculated as annual hours, not per visit, because pruning, weeding and detail work cluster seasonally. Estimate hours per month across the year and total them.

Annual contract = (Direct cost × (1 + overhead%)) ÷ (1 − margin%) · Monthly = Annual ÷ 12

Allocate equipment annually — mower depreciation or payments, blades, belts, string, repairs, trailer upkeep — and divide it across the properties that equipment services. Fuel and travel are per visit and should reflect the actual drive, not an average. Green-waste disposal is per visit if you haul, or near zero if the community allows an on-site pile.

Overhead is the part landscapers skip: insurance, office, phones, software, estimating time, unbilled windshield time, and your own management hours. If you don't know your real percentage, use a placeholder and reconcile it against your next profit-and-loss statement.

Enter your measured scope and real costs. The worksheet returns an annual contract price, the monthly billing figure, price per visit and price per turf acre per visit.

"Stonebridge Commons" is an illustrative example, not a past client: 148 homes, 6 acres of maintained turf, 32 visits per year, 3-person crew, 4.5 hours on site per visit. These figures match the worksheet defaults so you can reproduce them.

Note how much of the total is not mowing: mulch, enhancements and equipment together are roughly 40% of direct cost. That is why "how much per acre" is the wrong question to build an HOA bid around.

Put a table like this in the proposal. It ends nearly every "you were supposed to do X" conversation, and boards use it verbatim in their meeting minutes. Adjust frequencies to your climate and growing season.

Boards are volunteers reading three proposals the night before a meeting. Give them a one-page summary with the monthly number, the frequency table, the add-on list, your insurance status and a named contact with response times. Then attach the detail behind it.

Structure and language you can adapt are in the contractor proposal templates, and the multifamily version of the same document is the apartment proposal template.

If a management company administers the HOA, you will go through the same vendor-compliance process an apartment portfolio uses: COI with the association named as additional insured, workers' compensation, W-9, licenses and a signed vendor agreement. The specifics of the insurance side are covered in vendor insurance requirements, and the registration mechanics in the general vendor registration guide.

Confirm your entity and tax details are current — you'll need an accurate IRS Form W-9 and your state's business registration on file before the first invoice is paid.

Ask for ten minutes on the agenda. Open with the monthly number and what it buys — boards relax once the price is on the table. Walk the frequency table, then name the two or three things you saw on the walkthrough that the community will notice within 60 days. Close with your add-on list so the board knows what is not in the monthly figure.

Bring printed copies. Answer the price question directly if a cheaper bid comes up: compare frequency tables, not totals.

These are the ones that cost real money.