03 — Capital
Marina credit is a specialty. So is marina equity.
Most lenders and most funds have never underwritten a submerged-land lease or priced a dredge cycle, so they either pass or price the unfamiliarity. We arrange the debt, raise the equity, and represent owners through a sale — as operators who know what the asset actually does.
Capital services
Three mandates.
Every engagement starts the same way: we underwrite the facility ourselves before we take it to anybody else.
01
Marina financing
Debt placed with lenders who understand waterfront: regional banks and credit unions with marine books, insurance-company lenders, government-guaranteed programs for owner-operators, and specialty credit where the story needs it.
- Acquisition financing and assumption analysis
- Refinance, cash-out, and maturity management
- Capital-expenditure facilities for dock and utility replacement
- Seawall, dredge, and fuel-system project finance
- Dry-stack and covered-slip construction
- Owner-operator programs, where the borrower qualifies
What a lender package needs
- Three years of operating history
- Normalized, with owner add-backs identified rather than buried.
- The rent roll, standing up
- Slip-by-slip contracts, terms, escalators, and a defensible occupancy series.
- Land control
- Deed or lease, with term, renewal, and rent-reset mechanics spelled out.
- A capital plan
- Condition assessment and a sequenced budget — silence on capex is what kills marina credit approvals.
02
Capital raising
Equity for owners who want to grow, recapitalize, or take some chips off the table without handing over the marina they built. We raise from investors who want the asset class specifically — family offices, private capital, and operating partners — and we invest alongside where the mandate allows.
- Joint-venture equity for single-facility acquisitions
- Programmatic vehicles for multi-facility strategies
- Recapitalizations and partial liquidity for founding owners
- Preferred equity and gap capital behind senior debt
- Institutional-grade materials: model, memorandum, data room
- Investor reporting after the close, not just before it
What we bring to a raise
- An operating plan
- Not a pro forma — the same hundred-day plan our operations team would execute, with names against it.
- Facility-level data
- Occupancy, rate, and cost history from the platform, not a broker's summary page.
- Alignment
- We prefer structures where our fee depends on the asset performing after the wire clears.
03
Marina sales
Sell-side representation for owners, and origination for buyers. A marina sold on a summer’s worth of transient revenue and a handshake trades for meaningfully less than the same marina sold with a clean rent roll, a documented capital plan, and a buyer list that already knows the asset class.
- Valuation, broker opinions of value, and USPAP appraisals
- Sale preparation: rent roll cleanup, contracts, capital plan
- Confidential marketing to a qualified marina buyer list
- Buy-side origination, including off-market approaches
- Diligence management and quality-of-earnings support
- Transition planning so day one doesn't undo the price
The deal room
What we have on the market sits behind a screened registration — sellers release their numbers because we decide who sees them.
How we underwrite
Eight things we look at before anything else.
This is the checklist we run on every marina — whether we're placing debt on it, raising equity for it, or buying it ourselves.
01
Revenue quality
Contracted annual slips versus transient, rate history against market, escalators actually enforced, and how much of the top line is one storm away from disappearing.
02
Revenue per linear foot
The only comparison that travels between facilities. We normalize by slip mix, draft, beam, and covered versus open before we compare anything.
03
Ancillary attach
Fuel margin, service and yard throughput, dry-stack turns, storage, ship's store, food and beverage — where the operating upside usually hides.
04
Land and entitlement
Fee versus submerged-land lease, lease term and renewal risk, riparian rights, permitted slip count versus built, and what the regulator will let you add.
05
Physical condition
Piles, decking, electrical pedestals, fuel system, seawall, dredge cycle and spoil site. Deferred maintenance is priced as capital, not as a discount to hope.
06
Storm and insurance
Wind and surge exposure, historical claims, current premium trajectory, and whether the facility is insurable at a price the model survives.
07
Demand and supply
Waitlist depth, boat registrations and household income in the trade area, competitive facilities, and whether any new supply can actually be permitted.
08
Operating upside
The gap between how the facility is run today and how our operations team would run it — quantified line by line, not asserted as a synergy.
What we look for
Where we spend our own capital.
We look at every marina that comes to market and plenty that don't. These are the situations we move fastest on.
- Facility size
- Roughly 100 to 600 wet slips, with or without dry stack; smaller if it clusters with something we already run.
- Situation
- Generational transitions, undermanaged family assets, partnership breakups, and portfolios that outgrew their back office.
- Geography
- Inland reservoirs and lakes, the Southeast and Gulf, and protected coastal markets with real permitting barriers.
- Structure
- Outright purchase, joint venture with the existing owner, or management with an option — whatever keeps the operator engaged.
- What we pass on
- Short remaining land-lease terms with no renewal path, and facilities that are uninsurable at any price we can model.
MARINAmerica is not a registered broker-dealer or investment adviser. Nothing on this site is an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a commitment to lend or arrange financing. Real-estate brokerage and mortgage-brokerage services are provided through appropriately licensed affiliates or partners in the states where licensing is required.
Bring us the deal you can't get financed.
Or the one you can't price. We'll give you our read on the facility, the capital structure we think it supports, and whether we'd put our own money behind it.