Buying a Marina
Waterfront Real Estate That Bills Monthly
A marina is recurring revenue attached to a shoreline nobody is making more of: slips rent like apartments, dry storage renews annually, and the fuel dock, service yard, and store sell to a captive membership of boat owners. That mix is why the trade prices richly for its size and why institutional consolidators moved in years ago. What the listings understate is how much of the deal is paperwork about water: submerged land leases, dredging permits, environmental compliance on fuel systems. The prize is an occupied marina with a waitlist, owned bottomland or a long lease, and honest metal in the docks; the trap is deferred dredging and a lease that reprices at closing.
What Marinas Trade For
The marketplace's sold marina and fishing class puts half of transactions between 1.6x and 5.4x discretionary earnings. That class is a blend, naming full-service marinas alongside fishing charters, boat rental and waterfront retail, and it is small-business scale, so it prices an operating marina and not a waterfront property whose value is the land. The 8x to 14x EBITDA and 6% to 10% capitalization rates in circulation come from brokerages and from worked examples in an association deck, where the numbers were inputs showing that a cap rate and a multiple are reciprocal. Beyond the band: the real estate carries 40% to 60% of total value, so most sales are combined property-and-business deals, and the median marina runs about 92% full.
Slips, Storage, and the Revenue Around Them
Read the revenue in layers. Slip income first: count, size mix, rate card, occupancy, waitlist depth, and the contracts' terms, since annual agreements with utilities billed separately behave differently from month-to-month ties. Dry storage second, with its rack capacity, lift equipment, and labor. Then the ancillary layer that separates marinas of equal slip count: fuel margin and volume, the service yard's real earnings and its technicians, the ship's store, and any restaurant or boat-sales operation, each a business inside the business with its own margins and risks. A marina living on slips alone is simpler and slower; one heavy on service and fuel carries more operation and more upside.
Water, Depth, and the Regulatory File
The distinctive diligence is below the waterline. Who owns the bottomland, and if leased, on what term and reset schedule. What the controlling depth is at the entrance and in the fairways, when dredging was last done, what it cost, and what the permits allow next time, because silt is a recurring capital event with a regulator attached. What the fuel system's tanks, lines, and monitoring show, since a leak is an environmental liability that attaches to owners. What the storm and flood insurance really costs after recent seasons, and what the docks' age and materials imply for the replacement schedule. None of this appears in a listing's EBITDA, and all of it prices the deal.
What to Verify in Diligence
The record to assemble before the offer holds:
- Bottomland ownership or the submerged land lease: term, resets, transfer, and expiry
- Slip inventory, rate card, occupancy, waitlist, and the contracts' actual terms
- Dredging history, current depths, permit status, and the next cycle's cost
- Fuel system condition and compliance: tanks, lines, monitoring, and any incident history
- Dock and rack condition with a replacement schedule, plus lifts and service equipment
- Each ancillary business's own P&L: fuel, service, store, food, boat sales
- Insurance quotes at closing, storm and flood included, not the seller's legacy rates
Financeability Notes
Marinas finance as combined real-estate and operating deals, and SBA 504 and 7(a) structures work at the owner-operator scale. Every underwriter reads the file this guide does: the bottomland's tenure, the dredging cycle, the fuel system's compliance, and the insurance line after recent storm seasons. A submerged land lease shorter than the loan is the classic structural objection, and environmental diligence on the fuel infrastructure is standard rather than exceptional. Model debt service net of the harbormaster and service labor the operation needs, with the dredging reserve treated as scheduled capex, and let occupancy and the waitlist carry the growth story only as far as the rate card proves.
Terms in This Industry
Fuel dock
An on-water fuel operation, with its tanks, its permits and its spill liability.
Submerged land lease
The state or authority lease under the water where the docks actually sit.
Dry storage
Racked or lot storage for boats out of the water, sold as seasonal or annual contracts.
Per-foot rate
Slip rent charged by the linear foot, so the boats decide revenue more than the slips do.
Floating home tenancy
The one moored structure whose owner is a tenant, and the test that decides which is which.
Brokered boat deposit
A buyer's money on a boat the marina is selling for somebody else, held apart under a license.
Spill prevention plan
The written plan a fuel dock keeps on site, files with nobody, and owes anyway.
What the Data Says
The recreational marine trade's association puts the boating industry at $230 billion in annual economic impact across more than 36,000 businesses and 812,000 jobs, with about 12 million registered boats, by its 2023 economic impact study. That was up from $170 billion and 691,000 jobs in 2018, and it is the demand base every slip and rack a marina rents ultimately floats on.
Source: National Marine Manufacturers Association, 2023 Economic Impact Study (release of May 2023)
The census records 3,739 marinas with paid employees nationwide as of 2023, one of the scarcest establishment counts among the trades this site covers, and scarcity is the pricing story: slips cannot be manufactured, and waitlists do the appreciating.
The one marina platform transaction on the public record priced on funds from operations rather than earnings. The seller's own filing on a $5.65 billion sale of a hundred-plus-marina portfolio states a base purchase price at about 21 times the business's estimated funds from operations, and the filing never uses the phrase cap rate at all.
Source: Sun Communities, 8-K on the Safe Harbor Marinas sale (February 2025)
Enter earnings to apply this industry's cited band.
A sanity check against asking prices, not a valuation.
Holding a live deal in this industry? Underwrite it with the comps, cited band, and charge-off rate pre-loaded.
Compare bands across industries in the cited multiple bands by industry.
Who Else Is Buying in This Industry
- Suntex Marinas · Dallas, Texas
A national marina owner-operator that buys the property and the dockage and leaves the service side behind, so a seller keeps the boatyard and becomes a tenant.
- Charleston Harbor Marina · 2026 · A Mount Pleasant, South Carolina marina with more than 450 slips, bought beside the adjacent resort's separate buyers.
- 4 more confirmed on the firm's profile
- Blue Water · Ocean City, Maryland
An outdoor hospitality group that buys single waterfront and roadside properties, marinas and campgrounds among them, and runs many more for owners who keep them.
- Dewey Beach Yacht Club · 2023 · A Delaware waterfront club of floating docks, boat lifts, wet slips and new dry racks.
- 1 more confirmed on the firm's profile
Buyers is the shelf these come from, ordered by who closed something most recently.
What It Costs to Replace the Owner
The multiples above are quoted on SDE, which adds the owner's pay back into earnings, so they hold only if you do the owner's job. Hire someone instead and the going rate for the role comes back out. For this trade that is usually the manager who runs the site, the tenants, and the rules, paid a median of $69,990 a year nationally. Subtract it from SDE before applying any multiple, because at a 3x multiple that wage also takes about $209,970 off what the business is worth to you.
Property, real estate, and community association managers, BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (2025), national, all industries, before payroll taxes and benefits. Every role, and the same arithmetic worked end to end, is in Manager Wages.
The Numbers That Run This Business
- Slip occupancy and waitlist depth
- Bottomland tenure: owned or leased, and the lease's term
- Dredging cycle: last done, depths, next cost
- Ancillary revenue: fuel, service yard, store, food
- Dock and rack replacement schedule