Buying a pool route vs. building one: what Florida pool companies pay per account

If you run a pool service company in Florida, someone has offered to sell you a route. It's the fastest way to add accounts: sign, pay, and next week you have 50 more stops. But it's also the most expensive way, and the accounts don't always stay.

What a route costs in Florida

Routes are priced as a multiple of monthly recurring revenue. Industry guides commonly cite 8 to 12 times monthly revenue for an established route, higher for premium or turnkey ones. A recent analysis of 2,893 route listings found (PoolDial, 2026):

So in Florida, every account you buy costs you something like $1,200 up front, before you've cleaned the pool once.

What you're really buying

• Accounts that know someone else. The homeowner chose the seller, not you. Some will leave in the handover, and most route sales handle that with a guarantee period you'll want to read carefully.
• Someone else's pricing. Routes built on old, low prices are cheap per account for a reason.
• Someone else's map. A route that overlaps yours is worth a lot more to you than one across the county.

Building instead: the new-pool math

The alternative is winning accounts one at a time from homeowners who don't have a service yet. The biggest group is new pools: in the 90 days to October 7, 2026 we counted 863 new in-ground pools on Florida homes in the areas we cover, about 13 every weekday.

The cost is your time and postage, plus a list if you don't want to build it by hand. Compare it like this:

• A bought account: about $1,243, paid up front.
• A built account: whatever you spend on letters and a list in the month you win it. If a $99–$149 monthly list wins you even one account a month, it costs less than a tenth of a bought one.

We can't promise how many you'll win; that depends on your letter, your price and your area. But you can measure it in a month instead of paying a year's guess up front.

When buying still makes sense

• You need volume now to keep a new tech busy.
• The route is dense, in your area, and priced at the low end of the range.
• The seller will ride along and introduce you to the customers.

Plenty of companies do both: buy one good route, then fill the gaps in it with new pools on the same streets. To see where new pools are being built, check the busiest pool builders and the pool permit pages for Miami-Dade, Miami, Orlando, Hillsborough, Cape Coral, Port St. Lucie, Manatee.