Death of a boat business.....

I know a young couple who operate a very decent little sales and service shop in a middle sized city north of Seattle on Puget Sound. It's a family business that has supported them and their kids for the last several years, but when I ran into them today they mentioned they had decided to close up shop.

Interesting, and sad, is the reason why:

The local marina is expanding at their location. That should be good news, except for the fact that as part of the expansion a "public/ private partnership" is building a fancy new condominium complex. A huge new mooring basin has been dredged and developed, but guess what? Those slips aren't available long term to the general public (i.e. the taxpayers who funded the development of this public land), they are being given to the condo development company as a reward for developing the condo village at the site, and any time that a condo resident wants to purchase one of the slips (from the development company, of course), any tenant that is merely renting the slip will be subject to eviction.

How this concerns my friends and their boat shop: They are currently occupying a fairly old building that fronts a road running along the perimeter of the marina. They have a small office and retail area, and several service bays.

"Our lease is up pretty soon, and the Port is going to tear down this building," they said. "We've been offered the same square footage in one of the new commercial buildings that will be part of the condominium complex, but there's going to be a difference in rent. Right now, we pay about $25,000 per year to rent this space, but after they force us to move next year the rent would go up to $14,000 a month. That's a total of $168,000 per year in rent, or $143,000 more than we're paying now. We can't see any reason to keep the doors open with that sort of increase in overhead."

Obviously my friends did what anybody else would do in the same situation- took a careful look at how much they're able to put in their pockets each year with the current overhead, subtracted $143,000 from that number to reflect the future overhead, and looked at the amount left over and asked, "why bother"?

Congrats to the greedy arse port authorities and the high dollar condo developers. They have completely overlooked that fact that most of the infrastructure for boating consists of small and medium size family businesses. Those software millionaires living the fat life in the waterfront condo McMansions have a rude awakening in store......even if they buy the slips out from under the public and moor their gold plated boats, their very presence will have raised real estate values to the point where nobody will be able to remain in business to service or maintain them.

Coming before all that very long to the waterfront near you... Pretty sad.

And to a large full service ship yard in Ft Myers, recently replaced by high rise condos.

It was a shame when that closed.

Never once regretted the decision to sell. Never went back to see how the project turned out.

Gave less than a minute's real thought to selling the boat store, which was in a separate location. Once the inventory was sold off, the store was put up for sale. The property sold, the store was razed, and there's a strip mall there now.

Usually these sales take place behind the scenes, and it'd be nice if the seller actually spent some time to find a buyer who chose to preserve the business that his parents built.

In the case of the marina at Wiggins Pass, a large developer (Eco-Group) out of Tampa bought the property before anybody else even knew it was for sale. The company that ran the marina operation also has a large marina on Marco Island, but they were leasing the land in Naples. They would have bought that property in a New York minute if it was offered to them, but it was never offered to them.

The county tried to buy the property to keep it running as a marina, but the buyer/developer said that it wasn't for sale "at any price".

All city governments are pushing for more revenue and they will get it anyway they can.

The question is how can they take maximum benefit from their situation. I'm pretty sure that high dollar boats mean high dollar repairs and it would seem that they are positioned to take advantage of that.

For example, the largest small boat repair center in CT that is an all around repair shop is located smack in the middle of CT as far from any water as you can possibly get.

Just a thought.

But the ones at those two sites are for residents of the condos only.

Wanna take that bet?

Gotta love them Democrats.

> Only answer is a labour/socialist type party.

Well, I wouldn't get that far carried away.... yet.

Hey, longshot- it ain't the "fault" of the Republican party. Hey, shortwave- it ain't the "fault" of the Democratic party.

Port Commissions are under a lot of pressure to produce the highest possible economic return to their communities. In doing so, some of them lose sight of thier basic mission- to operate a maritime port.

If the only consideration in every community is "what is the highest and best use of every single square inch of property and how do we move from here to there?" any industry that requires any amount of space to operate or must by nature compete with intensive condo development for "desirable" locations (i.e waterfront) is in the crosshairs.

We're going to wind up with two economic classes in this country, upper and lower. The lower class won't be able to afford to boat, and the upper classes will drive waterfront values to the point where prices for boats,motors, and service would be have to be much higher than at present to cover overhead. That's exactly the dilema my friends faced... there's no way to raise prices enough to offset a 700% rent increase. If they did raise prices that high, they would lose most of their existing trade.

My family and I have spent a lot of fun times at that marina. However, under the new management, we no longer find anything of interest to us there. Especially the astronomical fees.

Any small business that is making it today has to have something special going for it. Cheap rent or just the right location or old money.

I don't recommend anyone open or buy a small business in the US unless it is out of their home with no employees.

It is all big business now or it is no business.

Don't get emotional about it, just believe it and make adjustments. Times change.

It just started happening in the Keys a couple of years ago, but fortunately the real estate market took a hit and slowed things down.

I had a boat stored at a marina that leased the land, and the landlord decided not to re-lease the property *at any price*. They sold it for $20 million to Eco-Group...a large developer out of Tampa.

Same thing happened to two other marinas in Naples in the past 3 years.

"Chuck Gould" <chuckgould.chuck@gmail.com> wrote in message