The COVID pool boom is subsiding for Maine companies

Pool sales were skyrocketing for Jenn Kelly’s family-run business during the early pandemic housing boom.

Her Winslow-based company, Pool Tech Inc., was fielding calls from as far north as Canada and as far south as New York state. For the first time in the history of the company her parents founded, Kelly had to hire people to answer the phones and source products and chemicals.

“All of a sudden, everybody wanted a pool,” Kelly said.

The shortage of materials and labor made it difficult to fully capitalize on that demand, Kelly said. Pool Tech had a two-year waiting list for new installations. Now that supply chain and workforce issues are improved, demand is “petering out,” she said.

Her story lines up with a national trend. From 2019 to 2020, 812,000 pools were installed in the U.S. in a 533 percent increase over typical years, CAPE Analytics said. Maine added more than 900 pools. The state is roughly in the middle of the pack among states in pools per capita, with Pool Research estimating about 28,000 residential ones here.

Those were the glory days. But times are tougher for the national companies that serve as a benchmark for the industry. Several companies saw stocks go down last week after an update from Pool Corp., a leading distributor of swimming pool equipment, supplies, chemicals and construction materials, said new pool activity could go down by 20 percent this year.

On a national scale, Pool Corp. has the stock down nearly 7 percent, according to Sherwood News . That’s the “worst session in almost two years,” wrote Luke Kawa, an editor at the outlet

“The most recent pool permit data suggests persistently weak demand for new pool construction,” Peter D. Arvan, the company’s CEO, said in an earnings update .

Kelly’s business is holding steady, she said, but others in Maine have changed their business more dramatically in a response to industry trends. After more than 50 years in business, Merit Pools of Portland, another family-run company based in southern Maine, has stopped installing pools altogether and only services existing customers, owner Sonia Damon said.

“The labor shortage is really what hurts,” Damon said. “Since COVID, the cost of everything has just skyrocketed, and there’s nobody left to work.”

For Chris Hahn, the sole owner of Houseworks LLC, business is slower, but he’s got as much work as he wants. Hahn is based in South China but works from Maine to Vermont in part because he specializes in “endless pools” that generate their own currents.

Because gyms were shut down during the early pandemic years, athletes as well as people in physical therapy needed an at-home alternative and turned to Hahn’s services. Since then, demand has thinned, he said.

“I’ve heard through customers that pool companies aren’t taking new clients,” Damon said. “The pandemic just got too crazy.”