Memphis Pool Builder Buyers Guide 2027

How To Vet Your Memphis Pool Builder and Protect Your Investment

Check the licence yourself. Get the insurance certificate from the insurer, not the salesman. Find out who actually does the digging, the steel, the gunite and the plumbing. Tie every payment to finished work. Get the warranty and the scope in writing. And go look at pools the builder finished five years ago, not five weeks ago. The rest of this page explains each step.

Choosing The Wrong Pool Builder Is Costly

A bad paint job gets repainted. A bad pool gets lived with, or torn out. The expensive mistakes are almost never about tile colour. They are structural, and they show up after the final payment:

• A shell that moves. Memphis sits on clay that shrinks in dry summers and swells in wet winters. A shell built without enough steel, or on ground that was never prepared for it, cracks.
• Water with nowhere to go. A yard that was not graded and drained around the new deck sends rain under the deck and against the shell.
• A job that stalls. A builder who takes large payments up front and juggles too many jobs can leave a hole in your yard for months.
• Liens on your house. If the builder does not pay a supplier or subcontractor, that unpaid bill can come back to the property owner.
• A warranty with nobody behind it. A lifetime warranty means nothing if the company that wrote it is gone in three years.

Check the Tennessee licence yourself

Tennessee requires a contractor licence before anyone bids or contracts a project of $25,000 or more as the prime contractor. Most new inground pools are well past that. Smaller residential jobs in Shelby County, from $3,000 to $24,999, fall under the state’s home improvement licence, and the state names swimming pools among the projects it covers; that licence requires a $10,000 surety bond plus liability and workers’ compensation insurance.

• Look it up. The Tennessee Board for Licensing Contractors has a public “Verify a License” search at search.cloud.commerce.tn.gov. Search the company name and the licence number they gave you.
• Match the names. The licence should belong to the company on your contract, not a cousin’s company or a business that “lets them use” its number.
• Ask about Mississippi if you live in DeSoto County: a Tennessee licence does not cover a job across the state line.

Find out who actually builds it

Plenty of pool companies are a salesperson, a designer and a schedule of subcontractors. That is not automatically bad, but you should know it, because the quality of your pool is the quality of the crew that shows up.

Get it all in writing

The contract is where a good builder and a risky one look the most different. Read it before you sign, and do not let anyone rush you.

• Payments tied to milestones. Dig, steel, gunite, plumbing and equipment, deck, plaster. You pay as each stage is done, not most of the price before anything is built.
• A full scope. Decking, electrical, gas for a heater, equipment brands and models, fencing, start-up and the first chemicals. Anything not written down is an extra later.
• Change orders in writing, with the price, before the work is done.
• The warranty in writing: what the shell, plumbing, equipment and workmanship each carry, for how long, and who you call.
• Lien waivers as payments are made, so a supplier the builder did not pay cannot come after your house.
• A realistic timeline that says what happens with rain days and inspection delays.

Look at old pools, not just new photos

Any builder’s gallery looks good on the day the water went in. What tells you about quality is how a pool looks after several Memphis summers and winters on clay.

• Ask for two or three pools that are five years old or more and, if the owners agree, go look: coping joints, deck cracks, plaster colour, how the equipment pad is laid out.
• Read recent reviews, not just the star rating. Look for how the builder handled the job that went wrong; every builder has one.
• Check the Better Business Bureau for complaints and whether they were answered.

Questions to ask and red flags

How American Pool Techs answers this list

We wrote this guide so you would ask every builder these questions, including us. Here are our answers.

• Licensed: Tennessee Contractor License #69393. Look it up.
• Local since 2006, family-owned, from offices in Brighton and Bartlett.
• In-house teams for design, construction, weekly service and repair, so the company that builds your pool is the one that services it.
• You see it before we dig: the free consultation includes a site visit, a 3D rendering of your backyard and a written quote.
• Old pools to look at: our gallery shows custom pools across Memphis, Germantown, Collierville and Arlington. Ask us to see ones that have been through several Memphis seasons.

See how we design and build custom pools →