If you’re a homeowner and you have a couple of bigger trees on your property then you should be maintaining them responsibly. That means making sure they are properly trimmed for your safety and the health of the tree. So when is the best time of year to get this sort of thing done? Does it even matter?
As it happens it does matter when you do it for a couple reasons. One thing is the health of the tree, and the other thing is price. I have four large oak trees on my property and those are the ones I will be talking about, but what I did to get the best price on tree trimming will work just the same for whatever tree you need to trim.
Do a little research first
You can start out by researching your specific tree. Start out by googling something like “when is the best time to trim my oak tree”. Of course you can substitute for whatever tree you have to trim. You might be surprised with what you find, I certainly was.
What I found was that it was best for me to trim the trees in the winter when they are dormant. The reasons for that are that it would be easier on the tree when you trim during this time because they are dormant. In the winter there are less bugs that can get into the cuts of the tree and give it a disease that may kill it.
When the tree is trimmed it has to heal all those cuts, and if it’s busy healing it will have a harder time fighting off the bugs that try to take advantage of the wounds. Another reason they gave for trimming in the winter was that because more leaves have fallen off the tree it would be easier to trim correctly.
What I found strange was the many recommendations to not trim the oak trees during the summer when it’s most vulnerable to disease. I thought that was a bit weird because a lot of my neighbors wanted to trim their trees in the summer before hurricane season came along. I get it, hurricane season is approaching and you start thinking about trimming trees as a precaution. But what not do it in the winter before for the health of the tree?
Next get some quotes for the tree trimming job
Once you’ve done your research you should then get a few quotes. And I mean a few. Especially if you want to get the best price. Tree trimming can be very expensive and the prices can be in such a wide range that you really have to shop around. When I got quotes to trim my 4 oak trees that were about 30 feet tall each I got quotes between $500 and $5,000. That’s a huge difference!
Now, I will say that the $500 quote was from someone that looked like they didn’t have any insurance. You want to be very careful with this type of job because it’s very dangerous. You don’t want someone on your property working without the correct insurance to cover you. Otherwise you might be footing the bill for their mistake.
I still did manage to get quotes from reputable companies that would do the work for between $2,000 and $5,000. That’s still a huge difference. However, I wasn’t just going to pay the $2,000. I wanted to negotiate a little.
Start your negotiation
What I did then was send an email out to five of the companies that I liked and gave me good quotes. Then I asked them if there was any way I could do this work for a bit of a discount. I asked for a better price on their quote and to let me know what they could do. I also told them I could wait to have the job done when they had some down time if that would give me a better price. I told them that I was sending this request to them and a couple other companies that I also liked.
What I got back was mixed. Some of them didn’t budge from the price, but a couple of them did. I was able to get 10% off from one of my quotes and a hundred dollars of one other one (which would have been 5%). However, a couple of them also responded with great info. They told me that this time of year (the summer) was very busy for them and that if I did the work in the winter ( November thru February) then I would get a better price.
This was great news for me. I was in no hurry to get things done. I wanted the best price, and I also knew that trimming the trees in the winter was the best thing for them anyway. So what I did with this info is I went back to five companies I send an email too about lowering their price and I told them that a couple companies have told me that if I got the work done in the winter that I would get a better price because it was their “off season.”
What happened next was that I heard back from one of the companies that I liked best and they told me yes for sure we can give you a better price during the winter. So I asked all of them what price they would give me in the winter for the same work. Again, a couple of them came back to me saying they wouldn’t lower their price, but I got three of them to give me lower prices for the same work, only to be done in the winter when they are slower.
I ended up picking the company that had the best price out of the group because I also liked the arborist that was working there. He was a younger professional that had just started his own company. He was unique because he was an arborist that also climbed and did the work with the crew. He was younger and newer so he was trying to grow his business and he even told me that was why “no one can compete with me, I bid and climb”
So how much did the price go down? It went from $2,000 to start. Then he lowered it to $1,900. Then he told me if I did it in the winter he would do it for $1,300. The same work for $700 less than the original bid with just a little work.