Pools By The Numbers: What They're Really Worth In Two Different Markets

Two questions come up every time a homeowner with a pool asks me what it's worth: does it actually move the sale price, and does it matter where you are. The honest answer is yes and yes, and the twelve weeks ending August 30, 2026 gave me real numbers to put behind it instead of a guess.

Let me put the two options side by side. Across the territory as a whole, homes with a pool sold at a median of $1,875,000. Homes without one sold at a median of $778,000. That gap held up across a large sample of sales, so this isn't a fluke from a handful of luxury closings skewing the average.

Here's where it gets interesting for anyone in Phoenix specifically. In the Phoenix ZIP that includes the Biltmore area, the pool premium is enormous on paper. Homes there with a pool sold at a median of $2,165,000, while homes without one sold at a median of $675,000. That's the widest pool spread anywhere in the territory, and it's happening in a market where the overall median sale price fell to $1,045,000, down about 20% year over year. So the pool isn't just a nice feature there. It's doing real work to keep a home's value out of the broader slide.

Scottsdale tells a different story, and it's worth naming honestly. In one of the Scottsdale ZIPs, pool homes sold at a median of $1,815,000 against $1,400,000 for homes without, a real premium but a much narrower one in dollar terms. What surprised me more in that same Scottsdale market is what the pool did to speed, not price. Homes with a pool there sold in a median of 113 days. Homes without one took a median of 174 days. That's about two months of difference, which matters just as much as the price tag if you're trying to time a move.

So which market wins the pool argument. It depends entirely on who's asking. If you own a pool home in the Phoenix Biltmore-area ZIP and you're weighing whether to list this fall, the data says your pool is carrying more of the price story there than almost anywhere else we track, and that's worth knowing before you set an asking price against a market that's cooled overall. If you're in that Scottsdale market and your priority is getting to closing rather than maximizing every dollar, the pool's real gift to you is roughly a two-month head start, not just the extra dollars.

I'll flag one thing I can't speak to yet. We don't have enough data this period to say whether pools move days on market the same way territory-wide, so I'm not going to pretend that pattern holds everywhere just because it held in one Scottsdale ZIP. What I'll be watching next period is whether that speed advantage shows up again there, or whether this window was a little bit of a fluke.

Manageable, not over the top, but it's a good example of why the same feature can mean two different things depending on which market you're standing in.