’Tis the season for some Philly suburbanites to spend $5,000 on professional holiday lights
A growing number of residents are outsourcing what is often one of the most arduous parts of their seasonal decorating, and they're paying a premium to do so.
As the sun set behind his Schwenksville home on Tuesday, Greg Bowden looked up in awe while three workers scurried across the roof, installing hundreds of lights.
The orange-vested climbers shimmied across the ridges, pulling themselves with their arms in front and their legs braced on either side. Hauling strands of lights, which had been custom-cut upon arrival, they slid slowly and cautiously down the roof’s sloped sides to the gutters. One dragged along a worn couch cushion, which they’d use for traction on the walk back up, to keep from slipping on the shingles.
Looking on from the front lawn, Bowden — who paid $5,000 for Four Seasons Property Services to install 600 lights on the house, front walkway, and shed — said his family of four simply loved Christmas. As he spoke, his wife, Jennifer, was putting up the family’s third artificial tree in a front room, and their 12- and 11-year-old children were peeking out the front door to see how the lights were coming.
Bowden said his family thought it was time they let professionals do the most arduous part of their annual decorating.
“We used to do it on our own,” said Bowden, 46, who owns a financial advising firm. But from start to finish, the process of putting up the lights was a pain: “I’m pulling them out of the garage. Half of them work. Half of them don’t work.”
And as for getting up on the roof and installing them in as many places as the Four Seasons crew was doing, “there’s no way,” Bowden said. “Forget about it.”
A growing number of Philadelphia-area residents are outsourcing their outdoor holiday decorating to professional companies for between $1,000 and $30,000. Early birds who are OK with their lights going up in September can get discounts, as do repeat customers.
“We’ve doubled our business in holiday lights every year,” said Brice Abrams, who started Four Seasons Property Services in 2021. His company is on track to install lights at about 300 homes and businesses this season. “It’s crazy how many people want it done.”
Abrams’ customers in Bucks, Chester, Delaware, Montgomery, and Berks Counties pay about $2,000 to $3,000 on average. But less pricey options are available. If someone has a 2,000- to 3,000-square-foot Colonial and wants a “simple” design — one in which the front gutter lines, front roof peaks, and maybe a couple posts are lit — they could pay as little as $950, he said.
The allure for customers is more than just the installation. Companies lease lights to the homeowners and vow to maintain the displays, with many guaranteeing a 24-hour response time if a bulb burns out or another Christmas calamity strikes.
They also take on the dreaded task of removing the lights come January, and store the strands until next season.
How the holiday-lighting business took off in the Philly suburbs
A decade ago, professional holiday lighting was a luxury reserved for only the wealthiest people in the most well-to-do neighborhoods, several local installers said. Over the past few years, however, it has turned into an annual investment for many middle- and upper-middle-class homeowners with sprawling properties, busy schedules, and neighbors who go all-out.
“Even if they have the time, they don’t have the ability to do what we can do,” said Vince Del Vacchio, owner of Del Vacchio Landscapes in Chester County. “Homes have gotten bigger. Roofs have gotten steeper.”
Del Vacchio’s company is among the area’s longest-running holiday decorators, having offered the service since 2001 as part of the national franchise Christmas Decor. It served a dozen properties that first year, the owner said. This season, it is on track to do more than 300 residential and commercial jobs, including homes in Chester, Delaware, and Montgomery Counties, and the state of Delaware.
When the company started installing holiday lights, “most people were like ‘Wow, we didn’t know somebody could do this. I can’t afford it, but it’s pretty cool,’” Del Vacchio said.
Now, 23 years later, he rarely encounters someone who doesn’t know they can pay someone to do their decorating. Installers advertise online and canvass neighborhoods with door-hangers. In many suburban developments, lawn signs sit in front of the already-merrified homes, featuring in large print the names and phone numbers of the companies responsible for the property’s holiday cheer.
As Del Vacchio sees it, the growing demand can be attributed in part to a natural instinct: Neighborly competitiveness.
“You see all these houses in your neighborhood lit,” he said. “You don’t want to be the one house without lights.”
Suzanne Taylor felt that way.
After moving to Plymouth Meeting from Roxborough this summer, the 55-year-old preschool director noticed how many of her new neighbors were getting holiday lights professionally installed. She used to love decorating her rowhouse in the city, putting flickering candles in the windows and lights on her bushes every year.
She couldn’t justify spending thousands on a decorating company, she said, so she got an out-of-work friend to hang her lights for $500 — a bargain.
In Haddonfield, a rock climber hustles to light as many homes as possible
On a crisp fall morning, Jonathan Keane was perched in a tree on the lawn of a 6,600-square-foot home in Haddonfield.
By 11 a.m. Monday, he and his two employees had already walked the expansive roof, installing white lights along its gutter line, and decked out the front bushes. Next they wrapped the tree’s branches with even more lights and hung shimmery silver ornaments, called starbursts, from its limbs.
In all, the crew from Holiday Light Pros NJ had hung about 400 linear feet of lights at the home, whose owners didn’t want to be identified for this article, and were on track to finish the $3,500 job by noon. Then they were going to split up to do two more installations.
From October through December, Keane spends most of his days like this. During the busiest season, right before and after Thanksgiving, he puts in 80- to 90-hour weeks.
An avid rock climber and former river and mountain guide in Alaska and Argentina, Keane traded his nomad life for hanging lights. It’s a similar grind, just in a vastly different setting.
Keane got the business off the ground four years ago by running on foot from door to door for 12 to 15 miles at a time in South Jersey, with a CamelBak of water and 700 door-tag advertisements.
Since then, Keane has watched demand take off. His income and customer base have doubled each season.
This year, Keane added two employees — Scott Ehlers, a 38-year-old construction worker and carpenter, and Steve Heinbaugh, a 24-year-old who previously installed solar panels. Keane, who’s 37, said the three-man team is on track to deck out more than 100 homes and a couple dozen businesses. Many of their new customers, including the owners of the Haddonfield home they decorated Monday, are referred by existing clients.
In the Haddonfield area, Keane said he gets excited when a homeowner wants to use multicolor lights, or even a simple red-and-white scheme. But most homeowners are fairly reserved, opting for all-white lights. The goal is to “keep up with the Joneses,” as Keane puts it, but not necessarily outshine them.
While some of his customers are older couples with physical limitations, he said, many are 40-something parents with young children.
“A house that someone is going to spend their three weekends decorating, I’m going to come in and decorate it in a couple hours,” Keane said. “Do you want to be like Clark Griswold and be like dangling from your gutter, or do you want to just call somebody who knows what they’re doing?”