Find the Perfect House

Are Pools Really a Bad Investment?
Tuesday Note:

Lessons from helping more than 1,800 families
 

For years, homeowners have been told that swimming pools are a poor investment. They're expensive. They're hard to maintain. They'll make your house harder to sell.

But after 40+ combined years of helping families buy and sell over the mountain, Hayden and I think the real lesson is much bigger than pools.

A few years ago, I was showing one of our listings with a beautiful backyard pool. The buyers liked the house, but they told me they planned to factor the cost of filling in the pool into their offer. I told them I'd be happy to write it up — but I suspected someone who was excited about that pool would probably outbid them.

That's exactly what happened. The home attracted several offers, including offers well above the asking price.

That experience reinforced something we've seen over and over: one of the biggest mistakes homeowners make is assuming their house has to appeal to everyone. It doesn't — and trying to appeal to everyone is often the wrong strategy entirely.

A home with a pool doesn't need to convince buyers who never wanted one. It needs to capture the attention of buyers who have been hoping to find exactly that. The same is true for a spectacular view along Shades Crest, one-level living in Vestavia, a mid-century gem in Homewood, or a golf course lot in Greystone. Those features aren't meant to appeal to every buyer. They're meant to be irresistible to the right buyer.

That philosophy has shaped the way we market homes for years. When we're selling a home with a great pool, we don't apologize for it — we celebrate it. We photograph it at dusk, when the water is glowing, and the house is beautifully illuminated behind it. We want the buyer who's been dreaming about summer evenings with family and friends to stop scrolling and think, "That's exactly what we've been looking for." Several of our pool listings in recent years have drawn multiple offers, and we don't think that's a coincidence.

There's another side to the investment question that's easy to overlook. If you're thinking about adding a pool to your own home, don't judge the decision solely by what you might recover when you eventually sell. Ask a different question: how many years will your family get to enjoy it?

If your children spend the next ten summers swimming with friends, if birthdays are celebrated in the backyard, if grandchildren eventually learn to swim there — part of the return on that investment has already been realized long before you ever put a sign in the yard.

Out of curiosity, I recently reviewed five years of home sales across the Over-the-Mountain communities we serve, comparing homes that sold with pools to those without. Now, the data can't prove that pools alone increase a home's value — more expensive homes are simply more likely to have them. But it certainly didn't support the common belief that pools are a liability. If anything, it reinforced what we've experienced firsthand: buyers who want a pool are often willing to compete aggressively for the right one.

So — are pools a bad investment?

For the family that never wanted one? Probably.

For the family that will enjoy it for years and eventually sell it to buyers hoping to find one? Probably not.

The bigger lesson is this: the goal isn't to make your home appeal to everyone. The goal is to make it the obvious choice for the buyers who will value it most.

That's true for pools. And it's true for almost every successful home sale.