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Condos for Boats
New Wave of High-End Marinas Hits South Florida
By Brian Bandell
Boating is often considered part of the lifestyle of the rich and famous. Most boat docks and marinas, however, are hardly luxurious. But a new real estate trend is seeking to take dry-storage boat facilities to luxurious levels. Think of it as upscale condo living for your boat.Sundance Marine in Fort Lauderdale now stores yachts on dry racks for wealthy boaters, but the owners of 16th Street Marina have an ambitious plan to transform the facility from a boat warehouse to a boat resort.
Plans for the newly renamed Harborage Club Fort Lauderdale include 320
dry slips, where boats up to 45 feet long can be lowered into the water on a crane attached to the ceiling. The $120,000 to $240,000 cost of buying a slip includes membership in the 12,000-square-foot yacht club, which includes a pool and restaurant atop the building. Harborage Club’s developer, Charleston, S.C.-based Atlantic Marina. Holdings, is also planning another upscale facility for 400 boats in Palm Beach Gardens.
“I think there’s a huge appetite for this here with the huge shortage of boat slips in South Florida,” said Dunston Powell, senior VP of acquisition and sales for Atlantic Marina Holdings. “You’ll see a lot more of this if people can buy the sites and secure the entitlements.”
For years, marina owners have expressed frustrations that their properties were picked off by residential developers. Instead of giving in, some have adapted by dreaming up high-end marinas capable of stacking larger boats, with country club-style amenities and concierge serviced as selling points.
Most of these projects sell the boat slips as “rackominiums” along with a membership package. Now that the residential market has slowed, developers of these dry-stack marinas say it’s smooth sailing ahead for them.
“For years, we were chasing sites that residential guys were outbidding us for,” Powell said. “It helps us a little bit that residential slowed down because we’re not competing with the Altmans and the Relateds of the world.” (Altman Cos. and the Related Group are residential development firms.)
With the fervor for condominiums sinking, country club-style rackominium projects are starting to flood in. Currently, there are two newly opened luxury dry-stack marinas in South Florida and seven more in the planning stages. Five of these will open in Fort Lauderdale, known as the boating capital of the world. There are about 157,000 registered boats in South Florida, according to the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles. Of those, 27,710 are between 26 feet and 64 feet, which is the target range for dry-stack storage. But that’s not counting boats registered in other places that dock here frequently. Many developers say their rackominium buyers include part-time residents who leave their boats in South Florida during the summer. Their boaters are looking for marina buildings able to withstand the punch of a hurricane.
Port Marina in Fort Lauderdale, which opened in January 2006, is the first large-scale marina in South Florida to fit into this category. All 125 slips are sold out. Port Marina was also one of the first to use a bridge crane attached to the ceiling to transport the boats between the water and their slips. The bridge crane can lift heavier boats to greater heights while using less space between aisles than forklifts, which are the tool choice for most dry-stack marinas.
An online sales listing at AquaMarine Realty offered boat slips at the Port Marina for $150,000 to $320,000. Chris Rosenberg, who developed Port Marina, is teaming with Aventura-based Aqua Marine Partners to build marinas with similar technology and even more amenities. Ten of these projects are in pre-development in Florida, including one in Aventura and one in Fort Lauderdale, Aqua Marine Partners CEO Andrew Sturner said.
After the Hi-Lift Marina in Aventura is developed into the Vertical Yacht Club Thunder Alley, it will still have dry slips for 269 boats, but many of them will be able to accommodate boats up to 43 feet, rather than less than 30.
By building a four-story rackominium, boat storage capacity on the 2-acre property will increase from 780,000 cubic feet to 2.2 million cubic feet. More storage space to sell means more income from the property.
“For the first time, I can say to the owner of a marina that the highest and best use of your property is a marina,” Sturner said.
The Aventura marina opened sales on 30 percent of its slips on Feb. 15, selling out within six weeks. The average price of a dry-slip plus yacht club membership is $185,000.
Aqua Marine Partners’ project in Fort Lauderdale is the Vertical Yacht Club Marina Mile, which is set to replace the New River Boat Club on State Road 84. Plans call for storing 100 yachts, up to 75 feet in length, on the 3-acre site. Traditionally, it would take 12 acres to dry stack those boats, but their patented bridge crane design can lift 80-foot boats 200 feet up, Sturner said.
CUSTOMER SERVICE SELLS
High-end marinas are angling to drench boat owners in service. Getting a boat from a traditional dry-stack marina can feel as pampering as picking up a cabinet from the rear of warehouse store. But upscale rackominiums dangle concierge services to hook boaters.
At Loggerhead Club & Marina in Riviera Beach, slip residents can order their boat to be gassed up, cleaned, provisioned with food and drinks, and given bait. If you call ahead, the boat can be ready for early Saturday morning, a dinner cruise or whenever you like. When planning a trip to a new place, the harbormaster also can chart your course, advise you on the weather and set up your lodgings and travel itinerary.
“You can keep your boat in a storage facility, but then you have got to drive to get it, stock it up and have a vehicle to tow it and launch at public facility or ramp,” Loggernead co-owner Raymond Graziotto said. “Most people agree the advantage to keeping high and dry in a facility on the water is that you can launch when you need it. It is a convenience that can that be worth quite a bit.”
Most boat owners in traditional dry marinas try to spend as little time there as possible, but these developers are designing their facilities as destinations. Many if the new marinas will offer amenities such as a restaurant, spa, kids’ playroom, bar and pool exclusively for members and their guests. In some cases, even the
public is welcome.
The Sails, planned along the 17th Street Causeway in Fort Lauderdale, will have a hotel, restaurant, tourist-oriented retail spa that will open to the public, as well as rackominium owners.
“What would a golf course be without a clubhouse? Some people join a golf club just for the clubhouse facilities,” said Ron Mastriana, who is developing The Sails with partner Tom Gonzalez of Shadow Marine. “I think it will replace some of the condo craze.”
Much like owning a condo, rackominiums require associating fees and casualty insurance. However, the increases there could be partially offset by savings is insurance on the boat or the ability to insure the boat at all.
Interest in dry-stack marinas increased after the active hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 destroyed scores of boats, Atlantic Marina Holdings’ Powell said. Now, most boat insurers won’t cover a large boat in Florida unless the owner files a plan of where to put it for protection during a hurricane. The developers of these high-end marinas say their facilities can withstand winds up to 140 mph.
Another benefit for boats stored in dry-stack marinas is less down time and fewer maintenance expenses. Damaged caused by being docked in salt water represents about 90 percent of a boat’s service cost, said Tony Risk, president of real estate brokerage Florida Marina Advisors of Fort Lauderdale. Boats kept in the water also need to be routinely checked on, which prompts many owners to hire someone for the task.
Risk said he helped Cabi Development, a subsidiary of Mexico’s GIXSA is best known for its Miami condo projects, last year purchase the site of Shirttail Charlie’s Restaurant and Riverfront Marina in Fort Lauderdale. The plan is to redevelop the site into a 500-slip dry stack with a bridge crane.
Some of the new marina projects want to take their service beyond hotel-style amenities to include onsite boat maintenance and repair facilities. That means boat owners can order the repairs without the time and cost of moving it to a boat yard.
That’s the plan of Naples-based BoatClubs America when it redevelops Fort Lauderdale’s Jackson Marine into the Fort Lauderdale BoatClub. The project calls for 300 dry slips and 14 wet slips. It also would add marine-related office and retail space to the site. But rather than redevelop the boat yard, it would enhance it. The proposed service center, run by MariTech Services, could hold
three 150-foot boats and close the door, BoatClubs America President Ed Ruff said. He’s been successful with similar projects in Southwest Florida.
A former residential developer, Ruff built the Barefoot BoatClub in Bonita Springs in 1995. It was one of the earliest dry-stack marinas to offer condo slips and feature country club amenities. Ruff said he originally sold the dry slips in Barefoot for $8.50 a cubic foot. The last resale was for $35 a cubic foot, he said.
“A good portion of the 10,000 marinas in America are obsolete because the spaces don’t fit the boats,” ruff said. “The building of marinas started changing because of Barefoot.”
DEMAND FOR MORE BOAT SLIPS
Developers are building so many dry-stack marinas because there is a shortage of boat slips here, said Frank Herhold, executive director of the Marine Industries Associating of South Florida. Sales of large boats have been increasing faster than small boats, but there are few local dry stacks that accept boats longer than 40 feet, he said.
“Given a choice, most boaters would prefer to see their boat out of the water, yet readily available,” Herhold said.
Marina owners have filed 42 applications in Broward County to expand the number of slips on their sites, he said. The fate of those requests will be determined by the county’s Boat Facility Siting Plan, which is being developed to balance the need for slip growth with manatee protection. Until that plan is approved, no additional boat slips can be approved in Broward County. It’s not much easier to get additional slips in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties. While this makes it tough to build new projects, it also puts upward pressure on slip prices.
Rule No. 1 for developers planning high-end dry stacks is to find a site with the slip permitting in place. Dealing with multiple levels of environmental regulation to add slips can take years. Yet, there are ways to work around that by making the allowed slips bigger or attempting to shift unused slips from a nearby site.
Miami-Dade County granted approval to take wet slips from the closed Apache Marina in Aventura and move them to Artech condo project on the same waterway because it was within the same manatee impact area, Aqua Marine Partners’ Sturner said. He said he’s working with a condo developer at another site to move unused wet slips in order to build a vertical yacht system. Sturner is looking to license his business plan to developers, but he needs at least 100 deeded dry slips per site.
There are good opportunities to redevelop marinas in South Florida, said Kit Denison, president of Fort Lauderdale-based Marine Realty, which helped Sturner’s group acquire the site for its Fort Lauderdale project. Denison’s Web site lists several properties in Fort Lauderdale and along the Miami River that could be redeveloped.
A few years ago, Denison said, marina owners would rather cash out to residential developers than stay in business. But that is changing.
“Now, with a softening of the real estate market in residential, among other things, and the high cost of building,” Denison said, “putting up a boat storage warehouse is easier than building a 10 or 15-story condo.”