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 Trio
Planting New Business In Landscape Assets
By Lee Weisbecker
October 31, 2003 - Triangle Business Journal - Raleigh businessman
Tom Hendrickson, whose business interests span such diverse areas as real
estate, furniture manufacturing and banking, is busy with yet another
venture.
He has partnered with Bill Glynn - known in the Triangle for his penchant
for tackling bold ideas - to plant the new company, Horticulture Asset
Management Inc., or HMI, in fertile soil. The duo has teamed up further with
professional horticulture expert David Argay.
The trio is cultivating plans to ask the $50-billion-plus "green
industry" - landscapers, landscape architects and the like - to look at
their urban and suburban creations in a different light.
With the help of Michael Dirr, an author, teacher and horticultural guru,
Hendrickson and company have come up with a massive database that can put a
value on the plant and tree assets of a property.
A Crepe Myrtle killed in an ice storm, for instance, would cost $733 to
replace if it was in its third year of life. If it had survived to its
fourth year, it would have been worth $802.
Similar data on a vast array of plant life has been catalogued according
to the growing conditions in any particular ZIP code.
Hendrickson, a seasoned Triangle real estate player and one of the
founders of North State Bank, says the database is far from an academic
exercise. "This is bigger than us," he says. "It's a revolutionary idea that
is being embraced by major associations in the industry."
Adds Glynn: "This is being launched as a big idea."
What's groundbreaking, they say, is the notion of generating large
horticultural inventories of particular properties and assigning a
scientifically derived replacement value for the individual items.
Hendrickson, Glynn and Argay believe their methodology can become the
industry standard.
"The industry doesn't have a useful vehicle for recognizing that these
assets appreciate in value over time," says Bob Dolibois, executive vice
president of the Washington, D.C.-based American Nursery & Landscape
Association.
"HMI is sitting out there alone with a way of doing this, and it really
has only become possible over the last 15 years with the development of very
complex databases."
But how will self-funded HMI, with an employee roster of 11 and a Web
site named moneygrowsontress.com, generate revenue?
Hendrickson and company plan to team up with Dolibois' group and other
green industry associations to sell database services to landscape
architects and other horticulture professionals.
From the data, these professionals could prepare plant asset inventories
to give or sell to their upscale home-owning customers. The homeowners then
could use the inventories as another measure of property value when their
homes go up for resale.
Further down the road, Hendrickson and Glynn see the database as an
impetus for the creation of a new field in the property and casualty
insurance industry. Dolibois says some homeowner's policies already cover
tree losses but only for up to $500 a tree, well below the cost of replacing
mature ones.
A more sophisticated insurance industry approach to horticultural assets
is something, he says, that will develop over time. |
