Americans will be diving this summer in the backyard pools they already have, but not so much in new ones.
Pool installations were part of the home improvement frenzy that swept the country during the pandemic as Americans were stuck at home. But recent signs show demand is slowing as households spend turn it more toward the holidays rather than renovations.
Pool Corp., a national pool equipment distributor with a market value of about $11 billion, said last week expects new pool construction to drop 15% to 20% This year. Some local contractors across the country are also seeing a setback.
Skip Ast III, director of sales at Shasta Pools in the Phoenix metropolitan area, said the local industry is in for a tougher time starting around 2022.
“If 2023 wasn’t already considered – by the amount of concentration – somewhat disastrous, this year was worse,” he said, but added that the company had managed to adapt.
While consumers do not reduce overall record spendingthose with extra money in their budgets are increasingly burning it on experiences such as travel, eating out and other service purchases.
Airlines and hotels are expecting a strong travel season, Cruise lines are making record bookings, and concert and sporting event tickets are still hot at high prices. Instead, non-essential household purchases are falling amid higher food costs and the Federal Reserve’s push to tame inflation by keeping interest rates high — sparking a long streak of steep mortgage and credit card rates.
The drop in large home ticket purchases it’s been many months, and pools aren’t the only backyard feature experiencing slower demand. Traeger Grills reported a drop in revenue in the first quarter, part of a trend that started early in the post-pandemic recovery. But businesses that rely on Americans’ appetite for home upgrades are still adjusting to leaner times — including pool builders.
In 2020, all kinds of pool facilities, from in-ground pools and hot tubs to typically cheaper inflatable and above-ground models, increased by 20%according to real estate analyst firm Cape Analytics.
At the time, “people started to settle for, ‘OK, we’re going to stay home for a while, we’ve got to bring the holidays into our backyards,'” said Ast, whose family has been in the pool building business for nearly 60 years. It reminded suppliers struggling to keep up with a backlog of orders and contractors facing months-long delays.
Scott Payne, a pool installer in Hatfield, Pennsylvania, also saw business explode during the pandemic: “As a company, we doubled revenue five of the first seven years. Two of those were during Covid.” He described receiving eight to 10 calls a day at peak demand.
But despite the most recent reductions nationwide, Payne and Ast said their businesses are doing well, even though both have raised prices due to rising material costs. Both said their work during the pandemic helped lay the groundwork to address that slowdown.
Responding to growing demand in an affluent area several years ago allowed Payne’s company to develop a “ubiquitous presence” there that it is still cashing in on, he said. While he has fewer projects in the works today, he makes more expensive ones, allowing his business to maintain its higher revenues.
“A lot of companies have maybe pulled back a little bit,” he said. “I can’t say we don’t see it, but maybe we’re a little bit insulated from it. We’re very, very busy still.”
Ast said Shasta’s own moves during the pandemic are also paying off as demand eases. It created an online calculator to help potential customers estimate the cost of their projects and launched a new pool care division that offers post-installation maintenance services. All these factors together have allowed the company to take a larger share of revenue from fewer consumers in the overall market, said Ast.
Even Pool Corp. pointed to the slowdown: With so many households recently building new pools or upgrading existing ones, there’s more demand for maintenance services like the ones Shasta now offers.
“We are encouraged that sales of maintenance-related products remained solid, as evidenced by volume growth in chemicals and equipment sales (excluding cleaners) which were down only 2% for the year, an improvement from the decline of 3 % that occurred in the first quarter of 2024,” the company said in its earnings release.
And with climate change contributing to earlier, hotter, more frequent heat waves — like these consumed much of the country in mid-June — some consumers may begin to see pools as more of a necessity.
In Arizona, Ast said, “the lines blur a bit between luxury and necessity in the middle of the desert.”
