Why Pay 4 Lawn Care, Sprinkler repair, H20 when U can XERISCAPE??

[Chris Watkins]

Why do so many Multi-unit property investors want/allow grass on their rental properties? 

Why pay for lawn care for $100 per month when you can do decorative rock or other xeriscape designs and hire some neighbor kid to spray weeds once a month? 

Seems like as a multi-unit property investor, you are looking for the smallest yard possible with the least amount of maintenance possible. Wouldn't it be ideal to have a lot with just a house, a lot of driveway parking and cement (low maintenance), a small amount of drip system w/ drought resistant plants, and a bunch of high end weed tarp underneath decorative rocks?

I realize that there are city regulations regarding vegetation. I realize that with rocks you will have to deal with weeds (even using a nice weed tarp). But wouldn't you rather spray for weeds over your rock landscape once a month over mowing every 7-days, all while paying for watering, sprinkler repair, and fertilizer (while still dealing with weeds)? 

I must be missing something here because I can't find much discussion on this and a lot of people recommend grass. Yet this will definitely affect your cap rates and bottom line numbers. 

I am a very practical person when it comes to the numbers. But I am also inexperienced as a landlord and just getting started. What am I missing? Any thoughts or recommendations?

More specific background to my question:

I am closing shortly on a duplex in Spanish Fork Utah. It's a small old duplex with a decent size lot that I plan to keep for 10+ years (hopefully more). There has never been an automatic sprinkler system installed. The seller has owned it 50+ years and has always manually moved around the sprinklers (lived close so that was nice). But I am about 15 minutes away and do not want to have to go there 2 times a week to manually move the sprinklers around all the time. Seems like a no-brainer to rent a bobcat for a day, level out the old very settled and uneven grass, throw on a heavy duty commercial weed tarp, decorative rocks, drought resistant plants, and a simple auto drip system. Or on top of that, take that $100 per month savings over 4 years and pay the 5k upfront to cement most of the lot for parking (carport?), storage units, and maybe a place to store a boat or RV (all up-sell opportunities for charging more to tenants). So the end result is a mostly cemented (virtually no maintenance lot) with decorative rocks and carefully placed drought resistance plants hooked up to a simple automatic drip system. That would be a super attractive property to have in my porfolio with  lower than normal operating costs. Why aren't more people doing that?