Buying a Pool Route

What you are buying, precisely

Not pools. Not equipment. You are buying the probability that a list of people keeps paying after the person they know stops turning up. Everything in diligence is aimed at estimating that probability, and everything in the price is a bet on it.

The diligence list

Twenty-four months of billing, not a customer list. You are counting the accounts that stopped, not the ones that remain.
Written agreements. Handshake accounts transfer worst.
The route on a map. Measure the miles between stops yourself.
A week of ride-alongs. You will learn more in five days than in any spreadsheet.
The chemistry logs. Pools that have been neglected become your problem in month one.
Pricing per account. Under-priced accounts are a repricing project, and repricing causes churn.
Why they are selling. Retirement and relocation are fine answers. “Focusing on construction” sometimes means the route is dying.

Painted illustration: two service trucks parked nose to tail on a quiet street — Stops plotted as flat blocks — the density picture, drawn once.

The transfer risk

Pool service is personal. A client who liked the old tech and did not choose you can leave in a month for no reason you can fix, and the industry norm is that a chunk of them do. That is the real risk in the deal, and it is why the introduction matters: the seller should walk the route with you, in person, and tell each client this was their choice.

Get a non-compete in writing

A seller who starts a “small route for a few old friends” six months later takes the best accounts with them. Bound by area and time, and enforceable in your state.

Painted illustration: a stack of closed buckets on a kerb beside a fence gate — Closed buckets stacked on a kerb — the inventory that sometimes comes with it.

Pricing it

Routes trade on a multiple of monthly gross, and the multiple varies by market and quarter — treat any figure quoted as a starting point, not a rate. The route value calculator takes the multiple as an input and then adjusts openly for churn and density, so you can see how much of the asking price rests on assumptions rather than revenue.

Then run a sample of the accounts through the pricing calculator at your own cost base. A route that is only profitable at the seller’s wage — often zero, because they were the tech — is not profitable.

Structuring the deal

Hold money back against retention. A common shape is a deposit at closing and the balance after ninety or a hundred and eighty days, adjusted for accounts that left in the meantime. It protects you from the one risk that matters and it costs a genuine seller nothing — which makes a seller’s refusal to consider it the most useful piece of diligence you will get.