DAVIS ISLANDS - Tim Tallent's wife liked it. He thought it was too small.
He agreed to buy the house on Davis Islands under one condition. They'd install a pool.
Deal. As of March, they were living and swimming at their new home.
"Sunday I was in the pool four times," Tallent said last week. For $24,000, Tallent's family joined thousands of other Hillsborough County homeowners in buying an amenity many consider essential to Florida living.
If experts are correct, the Tallents will recoup most, but not all, of the $24,000 when they eventually sell the house.
Generally, a pool adds no more than 10 percent to a house's value, slightly less than an extra bathroom.
But Floridians, who own about 625,000 household pools, don't seem to care. They keep spending money on them. "Most of our members are busier than ever, and have been for several years," said Wendy Parker, director of marketing for the Florida Swimming Pool Association.
Tallent wasn't thinking about property values when he added the pool, he said. He was thinking about the fun he and his family would have. The Tallents have two teenagers living at home.
In Palma Ceia, the new home of Chris Card and his family will include an $18,000 pool.
"We decided if we're going to go through the pain and agony of building a house, we're going to get a pool," said Card, executive director of Hillsborough Kids Inc.
Besides two teenage boys, Card has brothers and sisters in Michigan, where he grew up. When they come to frolic in sunny Florida, they want to take dips in sparkling water.
"You have to have a pool for those people in Michigan," Card joked.
Gerry Malynowsky, 44, is building a $35,000 pool behind his lakefront home in Odessa to enhance playtime with his young children. Property values didn't enter the picture, he said.
"On a scale of one to 10: zero," he said. "We never even thought about it as an investment."
Cocooning instinct
About one-fourth of Hillsborough County's 260,000 homeowners have pools, according to the Hillsborough County Property Appraiser's Office. Not surprisingly, big houses are more likely to have them than small ones.
South Tampa isn't as flush with pools as newer areas, including affluent developments in northwest Hillsborough County.
Only one South Tampa neighborhood, ritzy Culbreath Isles, shows up near the top of a property appraiser ranking of neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of pools. Some 92 percent of Culbreath Isles homes have a pool, putting it at No. 6 among Hillsborough neighborhoods. Harbour Island, Beach Park and Davis Islands don't crack 50 percent or rank among the 50 most pool-heavy neighborhoods.
Some South Tampa pool owners speculate that small lot sizes might be a limiting factor. But not in Card's case.
"We had very little back yard," said Card, whose lot is 50 by 100 feet. But "we weren't going to use it for much of anything else."
In several sections of Lutz's Cheval neighborhood, more than 97 percent of homes have pools. Sweetwater, a waterfront subdivision off Memorial Highway, has 122 homes with pools and six without.
Construction of pools seems to have kept pace with construction of homes. But today's pools are getting fancier.
Swimming pool industry experts say they benefited from a cocooning instinct that set in among Americans following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Many consumers became reluctant to travel or eat out as frequently. Instead, they began investing in home upgrades, from sod to sofas to spas.
Seeking to create a backyard environment, pool buyers are including features such as outdoor kitchens with expensive grills, waterfalls, fountains, artistic lighting, custom shapes and remote controls for the pool equipment.
New cleaning systems use water jets to push debris toward drains, eliminating the need to vacuum. Salt generators make weekly chlorine treatments a thing of the past.
"You don't get the eye irritation and skin irritation you can get with the other type of chlorine," said Ken McKenna, owner of Tampa Bay Pools in Brandon. "You don't have to get tablets or liquid at the store."
Tallent's pool on Davis Islands includes a spa, a waterfall leading into the spa and brick pavers.
North Tampa's Riviera Pools has installed images of dolphins and a pineapple on the bottoms of pools, said Tim Belanger, the company's contractor. For a firefighter, Riviera built a fountain out of a fire hydrant.
"A lot of our trends are more toward sight and sound," Belanger said.
Perhaps the most gaga new feature is what David Pelletz, president of Westfield Homes of Tampa, calls an "infinity-edge pool." It's a watery optical illusion that conceals the edge of the pool farthest from the house. Water constantly flows into a catch basin, which recycles the water.
"More bonding"
A typical pool, including screen enclosure, costs about $30,000, said Belanger and Pelletz.
Riviera recommends that homeowners spend about 10 percent of the value of their house on the pool so that neither the house nor the pool overwhelms the other, Belanger said.
In December, a pair of Florida State University professors studied the effects of different factors on home values. They concluded that a pool enhances a home's value up to 10 percent in the Southeast, 6 percent in the North, and 13 percent in the West and Southwest.
Tim Wilmath, senior appraiser in the county Property Appraiser's Office, calculated that a pool adds an average of $14,680 to the value of a home.
But that can vary by neighborhood, he said.
Tallent, a mortgage broker, thinks that even if you don't recoup your investment, you're likely to sell your house faster if it has a pool.
"It makes a home more desirable," he said.
Malynowsky, of Odessa, said he was warned about the costs of building and maintaining a pool.
"A lot of my friends said, "Yeah, Gerry, the pool's great for the first three weeks, and after that, you regret the day you bought it.' "
That didn't stop him. He wants his family to "stop being air-conditioning hostages" and start engaging in the kind of spontaneous play that a pool inspires.
"It's more lighthearted and fun," he said. "There's more bonding that goes on."
- Staff writer Janet Zink contributed to this report. Bill Coats can be reached at 269-5309 or coats@sptimes.com
