What Looks Like a Deal Today Is a Nightmare Tomorrow: How to Pick a Pool Remodeler in Phoenix
- Andy G.
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Our company has specialized in pool remodel and repair in Phoenix since 1957. Three, going on four generations of my family, and in all that time one thing never changes. Every time the housing market slows down, the corner-cutting speeds up. The tide is turning again right now, and we are already seeing it.
Before I go any further, I want to be straight with you. I do not enjoy writing this. The companies in these stories are in my trade, and every one of these messes makes the whole industry look bad, the honest builders right along with the bad ones. Pool remodeling is my bloodline, it's been my family's life work. When a few outfits take deposits and vanish, every pool company in town has to answer for it, and every homeowner gets a little more afraid to trust anyone with their backyard. This is bad for all of us. But staying quiet has not made it stop, and as we approach our 70th anniversary, I am growing tired of the same history repeating. With that said, I am writing this to help educate and protect you.
Phoenix is pool country and a boom-bust Wild West
There are something like 258,000 pools in this city, and somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000 across Maricopa County. More than a quarter of the homes here have one. That kind of demand pulls in a lot of companies, and plenty of them are not built to stick around.
The new pool business lives and dies with the housing market. When homes are going up and money is cheap, pool builders pop up everywhere. When rates climb and building stalls, they vanish. Look at the last crash. Phoenix pool permits fell from 23,749 in 2005 to about 5,166 by 2008. Almost an 80 percent drop in three years. Companies that had been building hundreds of pools a season were just gone.
It is happening again. Pool permits nationwide peaked in 2021 and hit their lowest point on record this past December, down about 35 percent in a single year. We have seen this movie before, and we know how it ends.
We are the ones who get the cleanup calls
Here is what that cycle looks like from the seat of our trucks. When new construction dries up, builders who only ever knew how to pour a brand-new pool start chasing remodel and repair work to keep the lights on. They take the job. They take the money. And they do work they were never built to do.
We know, because the phone rings. We get called out to remodel or repair pools that are three, four, five years old. Pools that should have 20 good years left in them, already falling apart because somebody shaved corners to hit a price. When we remodel a pool, we build it through the lens of 25 years before it needs us again. Three years against 25 years. That is the whole argument right there.
A pool builder is usually the wrong call for a remodel
Building a new pool and fixing an old one are not the same job. A new build is a clean slate. Open ground, a fresh design, no surprises. A remodel is detective work on somebody else's 20-year-old pool. You are figuring out why the first finish failed, chasing plumbing that disappears into buried valves and shared drains, and deciding whether the old shell can even take the repair.
A crew that has spent its whole life pouring new pools has never had to do any of that. So when the new work dries up and they pivot to remodeling, they bid too low because they cannot see what is coming, they hit the surprises halfway through, and you are the one who pays for it. Sometimes that is change orders and delays. Sometimes it is a half-finished pool in your backyard and a guy who stopped answering the phone.
Even the big names go under
If you think a household name keeps you safe, ask anybody who hired Paddock Pools. Paddock started right here in Phoenix in 1958, a year after we did. They grew into one of the most respected pool companies in the country, eight locations across the Valley at their peak. Then the recession hit. The company got sold off, changed hands twice, limped along for a few years, and in 2015 the state pulled its license after a stack of complaints.
They closed their doors with unfinished pools sitting in backyards all over town.
The state ended up paying out around $352,000 from its contractor recovery fund to finish some of those pools. Only 38 homeowners qualified. Everybody else got nothing. Some had signed with Paddock after the license was already suspended. Others had hired unlicensed guys to finish the work. A 60-year-old name with a national reputation, and families still got left holding the bag.
And it is not just the old names. In 2022, dozens of Valley homeowners filed complaints against a Mesa company called Outdoor Luxury Living after it collected deposits and left pool projects unfinished. The state registrar logged 36 complaints tied to roughly 1.9 million dollars in work. One of those homeowners summed it up to a local news crew: the only thing the company ever did well was show up to collect payment.
And it keeps happening, faster now. When Lakeside Pools out of Glendale lost its license in 2023 after dozens of abandonment complaints, our phone rang again. Homeowners with a hole in the ground and a contractor who stopped showing up, calling us to finish what somebody else walked away from. That is the part that never makes the news. When one of these outfits folds, the families they left behind still have a half-built pool in the yard, and they have to go find someone to make it right. More often than not, that someone is us.
This is not history. The calls are already coming in again, right now, this year. Behind each one is a family that is out real money, sometimes most of what they had, left with nothing but a hole in the ground baking in the summer heat. An empty, half-built pool in a Phoenix July is a hard thing to look at every single day. We will leave the naming to the state and the press. Our job is just to make those pools right.
How to spot the real thing in a sea of noise
Anybody can buy a wall of five-star reviews and put up a slick website. Takes a weekend. The things that actually tell you who you are dealing with are the ones nobody can fake.
Before you sign a thing, do this yourself:
Look up the license, then read the complaints. Every real contractor in Arizona has a license on file with the Registrar of Contractors. Pull it up yourself at azroc.gov. The license is the easy part. The complaint history is the part that matters, and it is public. No pile of glowing reviews can hide a record of formal complaints.
Pay attention to how they want the money. A good remodeler ties your payments to the work. A deposit to get going, the rest as the job moves and when it is finished. Anybody who wants the whole thing paid before they have turned a shovel is telling you something about how this is going to go.
Know what the recovery fund will and will not do. That state fund that saved some of the Paddock customers only helps people who hired a licensed contractor while the license was still good. Hire an unlicensed guy, or sign after a license gets pulled, and you are on your own.
Count the cycles, not just the years. Anybody can look good in a boom. The ones worth trusting are the ones still standing after a couple of busts. You cannot fake having survived 2008.
Check the credentials at the source. If they claim a manufacturer certification, it is listed on the manufacturer's own website. Go look.
Make sure you are hiring a company, not a shell. A real outfit has one name, a real address, and an owner who puts his name on the work. Watch the ones running a string of different LLCs, because that is often how a company walks away from a bad reputation and starts over clean.
The honesty is in the price
Here is the part people do not want to hear. The honest bid is hardly ever the cheapest one. Our price covers what it actually takes to do a pool right. The prep, the materials, the labor that makes a finish last 25 years instead of five. When a bid comes in way under everybody else, that gap did not come out of the goodness of anyone's heart. Something got left out, and you will find out what the hard way.
We have been at this since 1957. We have watched every boom wash in a fresh crop of shortcut artists, and every bust wash them right back out. What looks like a deal today turns into a nightmare tomorrow when you remodel with the wrong company.
If you are thinking about a remodel or a resurface, we will come take a look and give you a straight estimate. Free, no pressure, no games. 69 years, three going on four generations, and a pool built to last. That is the bar we hold ourselves to, and it is the one you should hold anybody who bids your job to.
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