Weekly Special | January 22, 2017

Is Now The Time To Buy A Home With A Pool?

Pool homes sell all year long, but they look the best and appear most valuable when Tallahassee is sporting temperatures of 90+ degrees outside.

If you look outside your window on this dreary January day, you’ll see that it is not exactly “swimming pool” weather.

But this might be the very reason that it could be the best time in 2017 to buy a home with a pool.

The graph above measures the percentage of homes with swimming pools that have sold each year (blue columns), while the red line shows the difference in values when we compare pool homes with homes that have no pool.

Both of these are recorded on the left vertical axis. So far in early 2017, 16% of the homes that have sold had a pool, and they sold, on average, for just 3% more than did the homes that had no swimming pool.

This suggests that when looking at $300,000 homes, if all else is equal, recent buyers have been able to buy a home with a pool and the pool has only cost them $9,000!

Seasonal Impact I suspect that we are seeing the impact of seasonality and that pool home values will rise at a faster rate than non-pool homes as the year gets warmer.

Regardless, the graph above shows 2017 has started with a higher percentage of homes with pools in the “sold” column compared to the past five years while the values are at a relative 5-year low.

This issue went with a longer report on our blog: read the full blog post. The original one-page Weekly Special PDF is still available.