Will a Pool Help Your Home Sell?
Last week, on a particularly hot and muggy July afternoon, I showed an interesting house. And one thing that caught my client’s eye was a beautiful back yard swimming pool shown on the online virtual tour. The MLS photos were stunning, showing an interesting design and clear turquoise blue water. We almost brought bathing suits to the showing!
But – and this time it was a pretty big but!
I guess it could have been worse. When we got to the back yard, at least there were no frogs currently living in the water. It was supposed to be a salt water pool, which is a great feature and might even cure some achey muscles. But it clearly hadn’t been serviced in quite a while, and the turquoise blue water was less than turquoise. It was murky and gross. The pool’s mechanical parts were sitting, not in a shed, but looked to be strewn off to the side of the pool on an unsheltered hillside.
Normally, late July and August are months when it’s so hot and muggy that a well-maintained back yard pool would help a house fly off the shelf. At the same time, a lot of people out there looking have never owned house with a pool, and many believe that the high water bills and the cost of maintenance would cost a lot more than membership in a pool near the house. In this situation, however, it was more a question of how much it would cost to restore the pool and find some way to house the equipment – some of which might have to be replaced.
Bottom line, it’s a really, really bad idea to make a pool that is pretty disgusting look like a centerfold for Swimming Pool Scene magazine in a virtual tour. And with this house, I think somebody should have talked the sellers into cleaning up the pool with a professional service instead of hiring a professional photographer using Photoshop!
Buyers who want a pool (and this certainly doesn’t include all buyers) will see it as an asset if it looks like they can go right from the settlement table to the lap lane without paying a boatload of money to a pool servicing company right off the bat.
