Looking at a house in Richardson this weekend and it has a pool from like 1998. Honestly, I've never owned a pool before, and the whole shifting clay soil thing in DFW is making me super paranoid. I know house foundations here get completely wrecked by the dry summers, but what about the actual pool shell? Do older pools just inevitably crack here?

The current owner seems to have taken okay care of it. The inspection report only had minor notes and the quote I got from my Safari Pools to update the old pump later on was pretty cheap, so I'm not stressing over the mechanical stuff too much. I'm mostly just terrified of waking up one day in August to a massive structural crack that costs 40k to fix because it hasn't rained in a month and the dirt shrunk.

For those of u with older pools in the metroplex ... how much of a nightmare is it actually? Do you have to literally water the dirt around the pool deck like you do with a house foundation?

Any advice helps.