Roy Morgan clarifies curious pool data

After providing information in March that suggested Australia has a staggering number of swimming pools installed (nearly 2.3 million), pollster Roy Morgan Research has made a correction to the “weighting” of the data released.

The new information provided in April clarifies what they say was an error in the way the data was expressed and weighted. Rather than “households with swimming pools”, the numbers should have been described as “individuals who live in households with swimming pools”.

This is a considerable difference, as they have been using a figure roughly equating to 2.5 people per household (although this figure changes over time and varies depending on location). This brings the figure back to about 920,000 pools installed across the country.

We discuss this in more detail in the upcoming issue of SPLASH! magazine, including advice from industry suppliers on what they believe to be the true state of the installed pool base.

But now that the initial queries about the data have been answered, we can look at the detail of what Roy Morgan Research has released.

Comparing the different states in relation to what percentage of the population has a swimming pool in their household provides some interesting reading.

In terms of household numbers, NSW has the largest number of households with pools while WA has the highest proportion of households with pools relative to the total households.

According to the survey, Perth tops the list for pool popularity, with almost 18 per cent of residents living in a household with a swimming pool, well above the national average. Similar figures are shown for Sydney (16 per cent) and Brisbane (15 per cent).

The capital city with the lowest proportion of home swimming pools is Hobart (where only four per cent of people have a pool at home), with regional Tasmania even lower than that (at three per cent). In fact, swimming pool ownership is generally less common in country Australia than in its capitals, with one key exception: regional Queensland, where the proportion of people with a swimming pool (17 per cent) is almost as high as in Perth.

There is more on this in the upcoming printed edition of SPLASH!

Contact: www.roymorgan.com