Wet slips, dry racks, and the waterline: marina credits combine real estate, hospitality, and weather into one underwriting problem.
Marina economics are a portfolio: slip and rack rental, fuel, service and repair, ship’s store, rentals, sometimes food and beverage — each line with its own seasonality and each exposed differently to the water itself. On reservoir properties the lake level is an operating variable: drawdowns and multi-year water management decisions drive slip utility and season length, so coverage must be demonstrated across the operating calendar, not at a single stabilized point.
Dry-stack storage changed the category’s credit profile: a hurricane-rated storage building with stacked racks is closer to specialized self-storage than to traditional marina operations — recurring contracts, low labor, weather-protected inventory — and demand is evidenced by registered-boat counts against available storage supply in the trade ring. Coastal projects carry wind-rating, surge, and insurance analysis as core technical content rather than appendix material.
The firm’s marina record includes a $23,750,000 SBA 504 dry-stack facility in Sarasota — 437 spaces in a 79,864-square-foot hurricane-rated building, FEMA Zone X, conditionally favorable on a current Phase I — and a $25,000,000 USDA B&I destination marina underwritten factor by factor under Reg 5001 with slip occupancy of 88 to 93 percent benchmarked against a supply-constrained market.
Marina and dry-stack demand follows registration-base capture analysis. Definition: the demand universe is the registered-boat population within the trailering or cruising radius, filtered to the vessel classes the facility can physically serve. Purpose: to anchor slip and rack absorption to a government-published count rather than a lifestyle narrative. Application: obtain state registration data by county and length class; net out vessels served by existing wet slips, racks, and private docks; and express the subject’s claim against the unserved remainder and documented waiting lists.
The mathematics: effective demand = registered vessels in radius × storage-seeking share − existing competitive capacity; required capture = subject units ÷ effective demand. A 437-space dry-stack facility against an effective demand pool of 3,100 unserved vessels requires a 14.1 percent capture — a figure the committee can judge directly against the facility’s positioning. Occupancy benchmarking supplies the cross-check: the recent Reg 5001 marina engagement carried slip occupancy of 88 to 93 percent against a market range of 85 to 95, placing the assumption inside observed reality. Revenue then prices by unit class against the surveyed rate structure. The rationale: registrations are objective, length-class filtering matches demand to the asset’s actual rack and slip dimensions, and the required-capture statement converts the entire market study into one number whose reasonableness an underwriter can interrogate.
Marina files flag on the water itself before the financials: reservoir projects with no lake-level analysis, coastal projects with surge and wind assumptions from a calmer decade, and dry-stack proposals whose building specification has not met the local wind code on paper yet. Revenue flags follow: slip rates benchmarked against supply-constrained markets that do not resemble the subject’s, ancillary income — fuel, service, store — projected at marina-industry averages without the staffing those lines require, and storage demand asserted from registered-boat counts alone without netting the supply already in the ring. The environmental record rounds out the list; fueling docks and historic boatyards carry site histories that surface late and expensively when not chased early.
Mitigation in this category leans on conditions and components. Environmental items become enumerated conditions precedent with the curing document named — the Sarasota dry-stack engagement carried exactly that structure, conditionally favorable on a current Phase I rather than stalled behind it. Where revenue lines outrun staffing reality, we separate the components and let each stand on its own economics; a recent Reg 5001 marina engagement was built factor by factor so the agency could see slip operations, fuel, and service individually before the consolidation. And where the wet-side risk is genuinely high — surge exposure, lake-level dependence — the analysis prices the insurance and the downtime rather than averaging them away, and the sponsor gets a project sized to survive its water.
Bring the water data: lake-level history for reservoirs, the flood determination and wind rating for coastal sites, and the lease or submerged-land status documented before the engagement opens. Treat dry-stack as the storage business it is — recurring contracts, rack economics, weather-protection premium — and let the study size it against registered-boat demand net of existing supply. Get the environmental history early on any site that ever fueled a boat. And sequence the components honestly: the marina that works is usually the storage and slip core covering debt, with fuel, service, and food layered as margin rather than load-bearing assumptions.
Two structural trends favor the category and one complicates it. Boat ownership grew durably through the past cycle while marina supply barely moved — coastal slip scarcity is real and rate growth has followed. Dry-stack’s rise is the second: hurricane-rated storage buildings have converted marina economics toward contract revenue that lenders read like self-storage, and the institutional money entering the category prices it that way. The complication is climate exposure: insurance availability and cost on coastal assets is the underwriting question of the decade, and the studies that lead with it — real quotes, elevation analysis, named-storm deductibles modeled — are the ones credit committees can actually use.
Engagements are typically initiated by the borrower, with lender or CDC confirmation obtained before work begins — institutions apply differing rules, so sponsors should confirm the required path with their lending contact — and are delivered in 10 to 15 business days from complete project data, and built to the program framework that governs the credit — SBA SOP 50 10 8 coverage minimums of 1.15x operating and 1.00x global, the 37-factor structure of USDA RD Instruction 5001, or the 1.20x convention of conventional credit policy — with a ten-year pro forma, sensitivity at ±5/10/15 percent, rate stress to +3.0 percent, and Monte Carlo analysis as standard equipment.
President, Wert-Berater, Inc. — independent feasibility study consultants since 1998. More than 4,000 feasibility studies completed across all 50 states and internationally, evaluating $40.2 billion in project value for SBA, USDA, EB-5, conventional, and institutional financing decisions. Fiduciary duty runs to the lender and agency in every engagement.
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