Weekly Special | August 27, 2016

How Do Swim Pools Impact Home Values?

With the end of our blistering hot Summer less than one month away, it’s a good time to evaluate the correlation between swimming pools and home values.

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

The graph above measures the percentage of homes that have sold each year that include a pool (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 2016, 14% of the homes that have sold had a pool, and they sold, on average, for 12% more than did the homes that had no swimming pool.

This suggests that when looking at $300,000 homes, if all else is equal, the home that has a pool is worth about $36,000 more than the one that has no pool.

It’s interesting that when the market collapsed in 2006, pools had no marketable value to buyers (in fact, the average pool home sold at a lower value than did the average home with no pool).

Today’s buyers are acknowledging value and home sellers are being compensated for their pools.

The original one-page Weekly Special PDF is still available.