Forty years ago, most Islanders were incredulous that something called a beach key, granting access to private, up-Island beaches, cost $1,000. What a ridiculous rip-off. Aren’t we surrounded by beaches? Of course, today, some wonder why they didn’t scrape together five G’s for a handful of keys. The six-figure price tags they now garner could have funded an early retirement. Not that anyone had five G’s back then.
Swimming pools, back in the day, were even crazier than keys. But today they just might be the next kick-me-in-the-seat-of-my-pants investment. Controversial and disdained in some circles, coveted in others, conventional swimming pools, lap pools, and spools – shorthand for the small pools that are sometimes called cocktail pools – are showing up across the Vineyard. They’re in the woods, or overlooking a $20 million water view, or, if you’re unlucky, right next door. Just ask the guy sitting on his deck and popping off the evening’s first Budweiser if he finds those cannonball launches next door amusing.
Reid G. Silva of Vineyard Land Surveying & Engineering, Inc., reports a lot more pools are in the ground today than in the mid-nineties. “On Martha’s Vineyard, there’s not many typical three-bedroom houses being built anymore,” he says. “People are building a second home, a bigger home, and they want more amenities and that includes a pool.”
Owners of so-called investment properties, in particular, are likely to drop the $150,000 to $250,000 for a pool as they bring a big bounty in the rental market. Homes with pools are the first ones to rent every season, says Karen Brown, the managing broker at Martha’s Vineyard Vacation Rentals & Real Estate Sales, and they can add $5,000 to a given weekly rental, depending on location.
“It’s probably the most requested item along with air conditioning,” she adds. “And believe it or not, all the news about great white sharks scares some people.”
Brown hears mainly from clients who have younger kids who don’t want to schlep to the beach only to pack up and head home by nap time. “Plus,” she adds, “I think a lot of people have pools of their own at home, and they’re used to it, and they don’t want anything less than they have back home.”
Alan Schweikert, principal broker at Ocean Park Realty, agrees. He figures a pool adds between 25 and 30 percent to every rental. “These days in real estate, pools are a pretty big deal,” he says. Most buyers looking to purchase properties worth more than $1 million “will ask if there’s room for a pool.”
One offshoot of the rise in pools and pool maintenance is a relatively new mini industry. There are now ten to twelve pool companies ready to meet demand in a market that was once served quite adequately by just a couple of long-standing businesses. As one company owner who did not want to be named put it, “Everyone thinks this is easy money, but it’s a lot more complicated and difficult. It’s not just about cleaning pools.”
So, where are these pools going? Edgartown leads the pack with about thirty permits issued for new pools in each of the last six years, for a total of some 180 new pools. Tisbury, by contrast, issued just nineteen total permits during the same six years, eight of which were in 2018. West Tisbury permitted some thirty total pools, but there, too, the trend appears to be up. Aquinnah has green-lighted eight pools over the last dozen years. In Oak Bluffs, pools fall under a broad category of “minor construction” and do not require a special pool permit, making it difficult to get an accurate count. Still, the building department estimates that twenty-one pools were built between 2014 and 2018, which suggests that over six years the number might have been about thirty.
Chilmark has the most restrictive bylaws regarding pools, requiring homeowners to wait two years after purchasing the home before even seeking a special permit for a pool. It’s hard to say if it’s working, however: Chilmark’s Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA) issued thirty-two permits over the six-year period, putting it about even with Oak Bluffs, which has no ZBA requirement.
Indeed, in a situation of unintended consequences, engineers and land surveyors say the bylaw has pushed the occasional Chilmark homeowner to install a pool just before putting the property on the market. Chris Alley, a man with a lot of face time before town zoning boards in his role as a civil engineer and project manager for Schofield, Barbini & Hoehn, recalls one property under agreement that stalled when the prospective buyer got wind of the two-year pool moratorium. The solution? The buyer gave the seller the money and time to put one in before the property closed.
What’s more, Alley says he can’t remember any application for a pool being rejected. If there’s concern, he says, it’s generally from neighbors about the noise, either from the pool machinery or the anticipated pool parties. But even then, zoning boards have granted permission and simply added conditions dealing with fencing, vegetation, or the pool’s location.
Even Rich Osnoss, the chair of Chilmark’s planning board, doesn’t think the swimming pool moratorium fully accomplishes its goal of slowing or stopping the encroachment of pools. “There are absolutely ways around it,” he says. “It, in effect, draws out the construction period for a new home. It’s really an appearance of propriety.”
As for whether Vineyarders really “need” pools, Silva doesn’t see why they have to be “such a big to-do. People like hanging around pools. They enjoy them,” he says and added: “It’s just a matter of price. If people could have afforded a gunite pool back in the day they would have done it.”
Look at it this way. It’s cheaper than a beach key.
