In these dog days of summer, when the heat melts your mind and the midday sun causes the air itself to sizzle, nothing is quite as life-affirming as a plunge into the crisp, crystalline embrace of your own backyard swimming pool.

A swimming pool is a liquid sanctuary that can make the difference between enduring the summer and enjoying it. But beyond the obvious perks of having a pool of your own, what sort of value does one add to—or subtract from—a home? The Realtor.com® data team dove into the data to find out.

Sure, a pool costs a good deal of money to construct—about $36,000 on average with in-ground model often going for more than double that estimate, according to Angi. And the upkeep on it is nothing to ignore.

But it can also pay off when it comes time to sell a home. Properties with a swimming pool typically have a listing price about 8% higher than similar homes nearby without. What’s more, that price premium has been on the rise.

In the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, the extra value a pool added to the price of a home was declining, according to a Realtor.com analysis. But then the pandemic hit. As more people gravitated toward larger homes on bigger lots, farther from urban cores, the swimming pool premium swelled, indicating rising demand.

“Especially post-lockdown, we saw people really connect with that need for more space, for more comforts at home. That meant more demand for homes with big yards and pools,” says national real estate appraiser Jonathan Miller, the president and CEO of Miller Samuel.

The uptick in the higher listing price for homes with a pool has been the most pronounced over the past couple of years in the Midwest and the South. It’s the smallest and most consistent in the West. And the Northeast has seen more fluctuations in how much extra value a pool adds to a home.

It might not be as obvious, Miller says, where pools can affect prices more.

“If you’re in some community—say in the outer suburbs of Minneapolis—and then you compare that to the suburbs of Miami, in one of those two places a pool is standard equipment,” Miller says. “If 99% of homes have a pool, then having a pool is just inherent in the value; but if you’re the one who doesn’t have the pool, then it’s a penalty.”

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Miller says he did a similar analysis, looking at just the wealthy New York City suburb of Greenwich, CT. He compared real estate with and without a swimming pool and how they changed during the pandemic.

“There was just a staggering difference,” Miller says. “The number of transactions with a pool expanded and the prices of homes with pools grew faster.”

Realtor.com data lends support to the idea that the pandemic era saw the pool premium grow. In 2017, 2018, and 2019, listings with a pool saw their additional values fall from around 10% to nearly 6%. But in 2021, the pool price bump was on the rise, and aside from a slump when mortgage rates first ticked up in the middle of 2022, that price premium has been headed back up. It hit a several-year high in July 2023.

That’s especially true for luxury buyers, says Jennifer Lenz, the managing director at Dolly Lenz Real Estate, with offices in New York and Florida.

“In many warm-weather metros, having a pool is almost always a requirement for luxury buyers shopping for a home,” Lenz says. For these buyers, a pool is a status symbol in addition to a sweet place to cool off or relax.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when mortgage rates were low and home prices were high, buyers prioritized quality-of-life amenities such as pools, she says. And the penalty for not having such amenities grew.

“Buyers will want the cost of adding one reflected in the purchase price,” she says. The time and effort required to install a pool can cause buyers to look elsewhere.

To identify the price premiums of single-family homes with a pool today, we looked at Realtor.com listing data from the past year. Then, to put that in context, we also looked at data going back to 2017. We looked at the price per square foot of homes with a pool and those without, and compared only homes with the same number of bedrooms and within the same ZIP code. This was to ensure we weren’t comparing modest homes to mansions and to account for price differences from one community to another.

Then we took all of those ZIP code–level price differences and aggregated them, up to their respective metropolitan areas, weighted by the number of listings, so that ZIP codes with fewer listings weren’t overrepresented in the analysis.

Ready to dive into where a pool is adding the most value to a home? These are the top 10 metropolitan areas where sellers are listing their homes with the biggest pool price premiums.

1. Fort Myers, FL

Median single-family home list price: $539,000
Swimming pool premium: 20.4%

2. Baton Rouge, LA

Median single-family home list price: $345,000
Swimming pool premium: 13.9%

3. Jackson, MS

Median single-family home list price: $279,000
Swimming pool premium: 11.7%

4. Dayton, OH

Median single-family home list price: $249,900
Swimming pool premium: 11.6%

5. Pittsburgh, PA

Median single-family home list price: $225,000
Swimming pool premium: 11.5%

6. Wichita, KS

Median single-family home list price: $220,000
Swimming pool premium: 11%

7. Kansas City, MO

Median single-family home list price: $450,000
Swimming pool premium: 8.9%

8. Las Vegas, NV

Median single-family home list price: $509,999
Swimming pool premium: 8.2%

9. Albuquerque, NM

Median single-family home list price: $425,000
Swimming pool premium: 7.4%

10. Knoxville, TN

Median single-family home list price: $484,000
Swimming pool premium: 7.3%

The post Dive In! Here Are the Places Where a Pool Adds the Most Value to a Home appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com®.