Stump Grinding in Woodberry Park, Donelson

Listing photos in nine days and a dead sweetgum stump out front

More than half the houses on these three streets are owned by somebody who does not live in them. They are 1,300 to 1,900 square feet of brick ranch, most of them renovated at least once, and they turn over. Between tenants, or right before a listing, somebody finally looks at the yard.

What they find is the stump the last tenant mowed around for four years. Usually a sweetgum or a Bradford pear, occasionally a water oak that a storm took, cut off at knee height by whoever removed the tree and never finished. It photographs terribly. It is the first thing an inspector points at and the easiest thing on the whole property to fix, and the person paying for it is often twelve hundred miles away with no way to look at it.

Quoting a Woodberry Park stump from photos

We do this constantly here and it works fine, as long as the photos answer the right questions. Put something in frame for scale, a shovel or a five-gallon bucket next to the stump beats a tape measure in a photo every time. Take a second shot from the street showing the path in, and a third of the gate if there is a fence.

Those three pictures usually get you a firm number rather than a range, and the number holds unless we find something genuinely different on site, in which case we call before doing anything. Property managers who send us the same three angles every time get quotes back faster than anyone else on our list, because there is nothing left to ask about.

Haul the grindings, do not heap them

On an owner-occupied house, leaving the grindings in the hole is often the right call and it saves money. On a turnover it is the wrong call every time. A mound of fresh spoil in a listing photo looks like a fresh hole in the ground, which is exactly what you were trying to get rid of, and the next tenant will find it with a mower deck.

So the standard package here is grind, load the spoil out, backfill with topsoil, rake it flush and throw seed. It reads as finished lawn in a photo within a couple of weeks in growing season, and immediately if you drop a piece of sod on it. We can do the sod too if the listing date is tight.

Bradford pear is the one that keeps coming back

There are a lot of them on Woodberry Dr, planted in the sixties and seventies, and they fail the same way every time: the trunk splits at the crotch in a wind event and half the tree comes down. Somebody cuts the rest to a stump and that should be the end of it.

It usually is not. Pear suckers hard off the root plate, and a stump that was cut but not ground will send up a thicket of shoots every spring that a tenant will mow flat and never mention to you. Grinding wide takes out the collar and most of the buttress roots, which stops the great majority of it. You may still see a few shoots the first season from roots further out. Mow them twice and they give up. It is worth knowing that going in rather than being surprised by it in April.

What a property manager gets from us

• Quotes from three photos, no site visit required and nobody needed at the house
• Grinding scheduled inside the same week when a listing or a turn date is driving it
• Spoil hauled off, topsoil in, raked flush and seeded so it reads as lawn in photos
• Before and after pictures texted or emailed the day the crew leaves
• One invoice to the management company, not to the tenant
• Multiple properties on the same street combined into one visit and one price