How we lost $60k when a pool company went bust

OPINION: When I saw news this week that TJ Perenara faced the prospect of losing $40,000 to a failed pool company, I realised, for the first time in my life, I had something in common with an All Black.

Sadly, it’s not that I’m representing my country in sport.

My family too faces the loss of a stomach-churning amount of money thanks to the demise of Container Pools, which went bust earlier this year.

The saga started for us in April last year, when we decided to get a quote for a pool.

My six-year-old does a great impression of a fish and we thought it would be nice for her to be able to swim at home. You know, first-world problems.

We got quotes from a few places but because of how our section is laid out, Container Pools seemed the best option. We recognised the brand name. The company had good reviews online. The turnaround time was allegedly not very long, which was unusual in those manic days of 2022 when every contractor in the country seemed to be booked for months.

We dithered for a while and didn’t sign up until about August. The owner told us we should be able to have it in by the end of the year. We were to pay a series of instalments for the pool, which would eventually cost us about $80,000 in total. Yikes.

I felt vaguely ill as I made the first instalment but received a cheery confirmation email. A few months later the second payment was due, then the third.

It was about this time that we started to worry. We had contractors preparing the site, so we hadn’t had a great sense of urgency, but we started to realise we weren’t getting any updates. Whenever I emailed to ask for a progress report, I was told I would be called “on Monday”. Those calls never came.

In January this year, we rang and found the company’s voicemail was overflowing to the point where we couldn’t leave a message. I started to panic.

A Google search revealed the first negative review I had seen. Another man was waiting for a pool that had been promised months earlier and could get no updates.

I found him on social media and connected. From there, we found more people who were waiting… and more. Eventually we had a group of about a dozen of us, all desperate to know what was going on.

We started to get the odd emailed update. The cyclone had caused damage. There were other delays. Production would start again soon. We were group three. We would get an update on our delivery date within a week.

We waited.

Then, in March, two of the other would-be customers decided they would wait no longer. One flew from Wellington to Auckland and the other met him to travel to the Helensville premises where the containers were being made.

We kept in touch via Facebook messenger throughout the day. It was not good news.

By coincidence, they spotted a Container Pools employee’s vehicle on the road and followed him. When they caught up, he told them he had been told that morning that he had been made redundant and the company was going into liquidation.

The intrepid pair then went out to the workshop, which they found deserted. Although it emerged there were about 60 customers waiting for pools, there were just a couple of shells on site.

They then went to the owner’s home where he confirmed the liquidation.

We never received any formal notification from the company about what was happening.

Liquidators were appointed, and their first report revealed the scale of the debt. There was more than $830,000 owed to supplier creditors, and that does not include the dozens of customers who had paid up to $65,000 each in deposits for pools that never arrived. The liquidator confirmed to Stuff the total figure owed by the company was somewhere between $2.5m-$3m.

We wait to see what distributions may be made as the liquidation process continues, but I am not optimistic. We aren’t secured creditors, so we rank at the bottom of the priority list.

The stories I’ve heard from other customers are devastating. One woman had bought a pool for a child to rehabilitate from an injury but now would never be able to afford to finish the project. Others had a house that had been built around a pool that was required for fire safety and now could not get their project approved by council.

We just have an expensively engineered patch of gravel in our garden. Not a great habitat for a fish.