Rental SFH with Pool

[Nick Coons]

I live in Tempe (Phoenix) and my primary residence has a pool. I'm looking to move and to convert my current residence to a long-term rental, and I'm trying to figure out how to deal with the pool. I've read various posts on here indicating that pools are liabilities, and lots of recommendations for just filling them in.

While I get all of that, I live in Phoenix, and here, a pool is an asset, both as a rental and ultimately when I sell the property. I understand the liabilities, including from a safety perspective, and I'm addressing all of those with my insurance carrier. So I've decided that I'm going to keep the pool, and I'm looking for advice on how to handle that from a rental perspective.

I've considered a couple of options:

1) Hire a maintenance company to take care of the pool and to make sure the pool is always in good condition, and then include that cost as part of the rent.

2) Allow the tenant to maintain the pool themselves at their own expense ( either by actually doing the work themselves, or hiring their own company), and then include the pool's condition as part of my regular inspections and charge them penalties for cleaning the pool in cases where it's in sub-par condition.

I think the merits of the first option are pretty obvious. I know that the pool is always kept in good shape, as my primary concern is that it would deteriorate, turn green, attract mosquitoes, violations from the city, those sorts of things.

The merits of the second are that it allows the tenant to maintain the pool themselves (if I were a tenant, I know I'd want this, because I like doing my own home maintenance, including my pool). I also get to advertise the rent at a lower amount since it won't include the pass-through pool maintenance costs.

I'm curious how other landlords of SFHs with pools handle this.