Curious how common is a house with a pool outside of the US? Not the touristy rental property locations, but just your average middle income people. In particular, I was thinking about China. But wondering about other countries too.
One of the examples of how common tax evasion was in Greece recently is that in one wealthy neighborhood, only a few hundred homeowners reported having backyard swimming pools. But after the tax inspectors reviewed aerial photos of the area, they found thousands of unreported pools.
This is partly driven by climate, of course. Unless you’re living in a mediterranean climate or warmer, a back-yard pool is a huge PITA, and you don’t get much use of out it. So cool but prosperous regions, like Scandinavia, tend not to have lots of backyard pools.
Low(ish) land values also help - the larger your housing lots, the easier it is to include a pool without sacrificing space for play, or flowerbeds, or an outdoor dining area, or whatever else you might want to do outdoors.
Plus, of course, a degree of prosperity.
Backyard pools are common here in Perth. Less so in Sydney. And less so again in Melbourne. These differences are largely down to climate and, to a lesser extent, to land values/population density.
The estate agents’ rule of thumb here is that putting in a pool neither adds to nor detracts from the value of most houses - the trouble and expense of maintaining the pool is more or less balanced in the minds of most buyers by the amenity value of having it. Houses with pools and houses without attract slightly different (though largely overlapping) groups of buyers, depending on whether buyers want a pool or not. But neither group has more money to spend than the other.
I don’t know of any in this village in East Anglia, but in the next village along, from the top of a double-decker one can see a very large pool in the smallish garden of a medium house; never seen anyone in it, but as it’s generally completely covered by a matt glass? cover, maybe the owners swim all day and night as in a giant aquarium.
Weather being what it is here, that might be quite comfortable for them, with rain lashing down on the glass above.
Go to Google maps, turn on satellite view and zoom in on wherever you want.
Looks like they’re reasonably common in my suburb, maybe 1 in 20 houses have one.
I agree with **UDS ** though. Home pools aren’t worth the effort IMHO.
When I was a child it seemed as though every second house in my suburb in Sydney had a pool. I’d guess they’re less common now: greater numbers of higher density dwellings; increasing land values; less willingness to take on the required maintenance; concern about UV exposure etc. I know of several families in the suburb who have had their pools filled in.
Just for fun I had a look on Google at my old neighbourhood. There still seem to be quite a number of backyard pools around.
I didn’t say that. I, in fact, have a home pool. I also have a 14-year old daughter. My neighbours on one side have a home pool; they have three teenage sons. My neighbours on the other side have no pool; they are a retired couple whose children are independent adults with their own homes. The neighbours across the road have a home pool, but their youngest has just moved out and they are debating whether they want to keep it.
And that’s really what it comes down to; it’s a time of life thing. I use the pool, and I enjoy it; so does my wife. But when my daughter grows up and moves out I’ll consider whether the use we get from it justifies the time and money we put into it. And when the time comes for us to downsize, it’s unlikely that a pool will be one of the features we will prioritise. (A smallish house within walking distance of the beach would seem a better idea!)
They’re very uncommon here in Israel. Most people live in apartments, not detached homes - we don’t have sprawling suburbs - and water is scarce and relatively expensive. Plus, getting building permits for these sort of thing can be a pain in the neck, and unlike Greece, the Israeli authorities tend to enforce these sort of things.
UDS nicely cpatures the Austalian experience with pools. My parents have one, and they are great when you have a family, and a drag when they have left home. Since my parents are still in the family home, I look after the pool for them.
We were talking about about pools a few days ago, on the block their house is on there are more houses with pools than without, and that is probably pretty true for the whole area. It is a reasonably well to do area (professionals dormitory), but not massively so. The street I live on in on the side of a hill with a 1 in 3 slope, which makes pools challenging. But still quite a few pools, although more like one house in four has one.
With the advent of modern salt water chlorinators and automatic vacuum devices the effort in looking after a pool, and the cost has dropped. Electricity and upkeep of the various devices is the main cost. But it is still a significant amount of money. Solar pool heaters made a big difference too, extending the useful season for using the pool quite a bit.
Germany: quite uncommon - we only get a few weeks of really hot weather, and for people with a large back garden an outdoor pool is in conflict with the trees people like to plant for shade (trees + pool = rotting leaves in pool).
I’d associate a private, permanent outdoor pool with rich people (i.e. people who can afford maintenance staff), not middle class people.
A lot of people with small kids and gardens own inflatable pools, though.
Virtually every small village or town upwards of a few thousand population has a public outdoor pool, though. E.g. this is the Freibad of our town (pop. 90k), apparently shot at indifferent weather (in really hot weather there are 2-3 times as much visitors as shown).
Ah, I’m so very jealous. Here in the UK our public pools tend to be pretty crap and quite expensive. We holiday in Austria and love the fact that pretty much every reasonable village has a pool like the one you show. With a leisure section and a sports section, slides, lanes, blocks…the lot. They are stainless steel (they look like exactly the same design as yours) and feel wonderful underfoot. And they are cheap to get in as well.
So no, in the UK we are not well served with pools for the public and private pools are rare indeed.
Depends where you live. In my truck driving days, one of our contracts was to deliver swimming pool accessories (fancy edging, ladders, covers etc) and many of these went to houses in the wealthy suburbs around Solihull.
The town where I live has recently replaced the old shabby pool with a very nice new one. A neat innovation is that they use waste heat from the nearby crematorium to heat the pool.
I’m sure it is very localised, I live in a fairly wealthy and fairly famous town in the south-east. population around 6000. Pretty much solid middle-class and I can only see 3 or 4 pools in the whole town on google maps.
However, move a mile or so to the exclusive millionaire’s houses down by the sea and you see many more. Still only about 1 in 10 have pools there though, even though money and land is no barrier.
Pretty common in South Africa in the middle class and up, but bear in mind that our middle class is tiny, so overall they’re not that common. But of the people I know personally (Upper-Middle, professionals, mostly 30-something couples) I’d say >75% of those with houses have a pool (we’re an exception, ourselves, but that’s because we use my in-laws’ pool 
) And the ones in apartments, the apartment complex will usually have a communal pool. I think the same holds for all the other big cities like Joburg and Durban.
How common are they in the US? I don’t really see whole bunches of them around - but then, I live in northern New England, a fairly cold part of the country.
In 13 years in Britain I only ever saw one home pool (and unsurprisingly the owners were my parents’ ultra-wealthy friends.) It’s too cold for unheated pools to be practical, and the cost of heating a pool are astronomical. Plus, houses and gardens are far smaller than they are in the US.
Now I live in Florida and our house is the only one in our (modest) residential subdivision that doesn’t have a pool (we specifically looked for a pool-free house because I didn’t want to deal with the cost or hassle of upkeep.)
I lived in Japan for 25 years over a 35-year period, and I never saw one. The house we owned in Tokyo had zero land. Not technically zero, but many 12 to 30 inches from the house to the fence.
I haven’t seen one here in Taiwan either.
Pools are not that uncommon in Britain. The neighbours around the corner from me (in a fairly unremarkable “dormitory town” commuter area) have recently put one in their garden. It appears to take up almost all the garden, and it has a retractable cover over it.
Picture from Google Maps: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
I just had a quick scroll around my town, and there are maybe 15 or 20 outdoor pools, and that’s in a town of 20,000 people.
Once you get into the “posh” areas, pools are everywhere.
Germany has been covered already, but there is a little data point that I would like to add. I’d say that here there are more indoor pools than outdoor ones, although they are considered even bigger white elephants.
1 for every 20,000 people is pretty uncommon by US standards. There are a shade over 8 million residential pools in the US, versus ~250,000 in the UK.