What You're Actually Buying
A pool route is a list of addresses, a set of recurring relationships, and a monthly revenue number. That's it. You are not buying a business with hard assets, proprietary systems, or a brand. You are buying someone else's customers, and those customers can leave the day they find out the route changed hands.
That matters for pricing. A lot of sellers, and a lot of brokers, will quote you a multiple of monthly recurring revenue and act like that number is settled law. It's not. The multiple is a starting point for negotiation, not a fair market formula.
The Standard Multiple and Why It's Only Half the Story
In most markets, residential pool routes sell somewhere between eight and twelve times monthly revenue. A route doing $5,000 a month might list at $45,000 to $60,000. That range exists for a reason: routes are not all the same quality, and the multiple should move based on what's underneath the number.
Run the math on a concrete example. Say the route grosses $5,500 a month across 50 pools. Average ticket is $110. Before you accept any asking price, you need to know the following.
- What is the average stop time? If the seller is spending 25 minutes at pools that should take 15, the labor cost assumption built into the price is wrong for you.
- What is the chemical cost per pool? If he's using $9 of chemical per visit because the pools are algae-prone or poorly built, that's not $4 or $5 like a clean residential stop.
- What percentage of customers are on full-service versus chemical-only? Chemical-only accounts at $60 a month look great until you realize your drive time per stop may be nearly as long as full service.
- How are the routes geographically clustered? A route that covers 18 miles of suburban sprawl is worth less than one where stops are 3 minutes apart.
- What is the equipment condition? If half the pools have aging DE filters or salt cells that are two years past replacement, you will be funding those conversations out of your own pocket shortly after the ink dries.
Digging Into the Real Numbers
Ask for a stop-by-stop list. Any seller who won't provide it is not serious or is hiding something. With that list, build your own model.
Take each pool and estimate your actual on-site time, your drive time to the next stop, and your chemical cost. Use your numbers, not the seller's. If a pool is 17 minutes on site with an 11-minute drive to the next one and $4.80 in chlorine plus $1.20 in other chemicals, your cost to service that stop is real and calculable. Add your labor rate, your truck cost per mile, and any chemical markup you apply. Do that across every single pool on the list.
If the seller won't give you individual addresses but will give you zip codes or a general area, that's a red flag. You cannot evaluate a route without knowing where the stops actually are.
Attrition Is the Risk Nobody Prices In
Industry experience suggests somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of customers leave within the first year of a route changing hands. That's not a published study, that's just what operators who have bought and sold routes report. Treat it as a planning assumption, not a guarantee.
On a $5,500 per month route at a 15 percent attrition rate, you lose about $825 a month in revenue within the first year. That's $9,900 in annualized revenue gone. If you paid $55,000 for the route, that attrition just changed your effective multiple from 10x to about 11.8x. Not catastrophic, but it should affect what you offer.
One way to protect yourself is to negotiate a retention clause. The seller holds back 20 to 25 percent of the purchase price for 90 days. If customers cancel, you deduct the monthly value of those accounts from the holdback. Some sellers won't agree to this. The ones who are confident in their customer relationships usually will.
What the Seller's Books Actually Show You
Ask for 12 months of bank statements or payment records, not just an invoice summary. You want to see what customers actually paid, not what they were billed. You also want to see cancellations over the past year, and why. One or two is normal. Six or eight means something is wrong with service quality, pricing, or the customer base.
Look at the equipment service side separately. Some operators include repair revenue in the route valuation. Don't let them. Repair revenue is inconsistent, it depends on your relationship with customers, and you'll need to rebuild that trust from scratch. Value the route on the recurring monthly service revenue only.
Decide What You're Paying For
If the route is tightly clustered, the customers are long-tenured, the seller will agree to a 30-day transition period where he introduces you to accounts, and there's a reasonable holdback clause, paying 10x or even 11x monthly revenue might be fair.
If the route is spread out, customers are mixed-tenure, the seller wants a quick close with no holdback, and you're seeing two or three cancellations already in the disclosed history, you should be at 8x or lower. Walk away if the seller won't move.
The seller's asking price reflects what he wants. Your offer should reflect what the route is actually worth to your operation, with your labor rate, your truck, your chemical costs, and your geographic reality.
Getting Organized Before Day One
Once you close, the operational challenge is managing two sets of customer records, integrating the new stops into your existing schedule, and making sure nothing falls through. If you are tracking routes manually or across a patchwork of tools, this is where things break. Having a single place where every stop, every customer note, and every service record lives matters more the day you add 30 or 40 new pools.
getLucci is built for exactly this kind of operation. It's free for your first 50 pools, so if you're absorbing a new route, you can get everything set up before you spend a dollar.