What a Swimming Pool Really Does to Your Home's Value

By Chip Hodgkins

The Hodgkins Homes Team specializes in Residential Real Estate Selling and Buying, mortgage, title, development, new construction and remodeling.

We hear it all the time from homeowners, and just as often from buyers: “I don’t want to buy a house if it has a swimming pool.” It catches sellers off guard because if you’ve got a pool, you might assume it’s a selling point. The reality in Central New York is more complicated than that, and understanding it before you list can be the difference between pricing your home right and watching it sit.

A pool changes who will even look. Here’s the part that surprises people most. In our experience in this market, roughly a quarter of the market won’t even look at a house that has a swimming pool. For those buyers, the objection isn’t really about the pool itself; it’s everything attached to it: the maintenance, the ongoing cost, the liability, and, for parents, the worry about a child’s safety. Those concerns are enough that they’ll filter your home out before they ever walk through the door, which immediately narrows your pool of potential buyers in a climate like ours.

Most buyers won’t pay extra for it. On the other hand, only a small slice of the market, around 5%, is actively looking for a home with a pool and is willing to pay more to get one. That leaves the large majority in the middle, somewhere around 70%, who simply don’t care one way or the other. They’ll happily buy a home with a pool, but they aren’t going to hand you a dime extra for it.

This tracks with what general housing resources note too: a pool typically returns only a portion of its cost, and its value depends heavily on the climate and the surrounding outdoor space. In cooler regions like ours, where the pool sits unused for much of the year, buyers often treat it as a maintenance commitment rather than a premium feature. That’s why pricing your home correctly means being honest about how the pool actually plays in our market rather than how you wish it did.

The backyard environment is what sells. This is the piece worth holding onto. If your pool sits in a gorgeous patio and backyard setting, you may well get more for your home, but the value is coming from the environment, not the pool itself. A beautiful, usable outdoor space is something buyers respond to and pay for, while the pool alone is closer to neutral.

It’s the whole feel of the backyard that does the work, which is part of why the right outdoor and home updates tend to move the needle more than a single big-ticket feature. When you’re thinking about which projects actually add value, the surrounding space usually earns its keep in ways the pool on its own doesn’t.

So if you have a swimming pool and you’re getting ready to sell, the most important thing is to go in clear-eyed about how it affects your pricing and your buyer pool. Price it as though every buyer will pay a premium for the pool, and you’ll likely sit on the market; price and present it with the whole backyard environment in mind, and you put yourself in a far stronger position. The best place to start is understanding what your home is truly worth in today’s market, pool and all, so you can make your home irresistible to the right buyers.

Give us a call or text at (315) 449-6697 or email us at Info@Hodgkinshomes.com, or visit HodgkinsHomes.com. We’d be glad to help you price and position your home the right way.