Marina Investments: A 1031 Exchange Option Most Investors Haven't Considered

Why Blackstone Paid $5.65 Billion for Marinas

In April 2025, Blackstone paid $5.65 billion to acquire Safe Harbor Marinas, the largest marina operator in the country, with 138 locations and roughly 50,000 wet and dry slips.² It was the largest marina transaction in history.

But here's the part that should get your attention: Sun Communities had bought Safe Harbor just five years earlier for $2.11 billion.³ That's roughly a 2.7x increase in enterprise value, driven largely by Safe Harbor's expansion from 101 to 138 marinas during that period. One deal doesn't tell you what the next one will look like, and past transaction values don't predict future performance, but it does tell you something about how the market could be repricing these assets.

Blackstone didn't buy Safe Harbor for a quick flip, either. They structured the acquisition as a long-term hold.⁴ Their stated rationale: marinas are "essential, high-barrier infrastructure assets" with "key long-term thematic tailwinds."⁵

What the Blackstone Safe Harbor Deal Means for 1031 Investors

The takeaway isn't that Blackstone is always right. It's that the structural characteristics of marinas, limited supply, high occupancy, multiple revenue streams, are attracting serious institutional attention for the first time. And the window is still wide open: roughly 70% of U.S. marinas are still privately owned small businesses (with most of the rest being government-operated), institutional ownership is estimated at just 1 to 2% of the total market, and no single company holds more than 5% market share.⁶ This is about as fragmented as a real estate sector gets.

The Marina Cap Rate Premium: Potentially High-Yield Real Estate for DST Investors

The most immediate appeal is the cap rate. Marinas typically trade at cap rates ranging from 6% to 12%+, depending on quality, location, and operator.⁷ If you're used to seeing 5% caps in multifamily DSTs, a 9% or 10% cap rate probably raises a question: what's the catch?

Cap rates are the market's way of pricing risk. The more uncertainty buyers see, the higher the yield they demand. Multifamily trades at lower caps because it's a mature, well-understood asset class with deep financing markets, established lending relationships, and a large pool of buyers competing for deals on both the buy and the sell side. That competition has compressed yields over time.

In asset classes with fewer buyers, less available financing, and more operational complexity, yields may stay wider because investors require more compensation for the added uncertainty. A marina trading at a 9% or 10% cap is the market telling you there's more operational complexity, fewer lenders who understand the asset, and a thinner pool of buyers on the exit. Higher yield is compensation for those factors. The question for investors is whether that risk premium is appropriate, or whether the market is overpricing risk in a sector it simply hasn't taken the time to understand yet.

How Marina Cap Rates Compare to Multifamily and NNN DSTs

The other reason those cap rates are still wide: most of the 9,000 to 11,500 marinas in the U.S. are still owned by families who've run them for decades.⁹ There simply aren't enough institutional buyers in the space yet to compress pricing the way they have in multifamily or industrial.

Why New Marinas Aren't Being Built (and What That Means for Investors)

Building a new marina is exceptionally difficult. You need waterfront land (increasingly scarce), and federal and state environmental permits that can take years to obtain.¹⁰ No new lakes are being created, coastal land is either developed or protected, and the number of marinas in the U.S. has been declining for years.⁹

Marina Supply and Demand: 12 Boats for Every Slip

Meanwhile, demand has been strong. There are roughly 12 registered boats for every marina slip in the country.¹¹ Median marina occupancy sits at 92%, and 56% of marinas report occupancy above 95%.¹² At those occupancy levels, operators may have meaningful flexibility to adjust slip fees, and many are doing exactly that. In the Southeast, slip fees have been increasing about 15% per year as demand from relocating boaters continues to outpace available slips.¹¹

More Than Boat Parking: How Marina Investments Generate Income

One thing that separates marinas from single-purpose real estate is the diversity of revenue streams. A well-run marina isn't just renting slips. It might generate income from 8 to 12 distinct sources:⁶

Marina Revenue Streams: A well-run marina can generate income from 8 to 12 distinct sources.

This diversification creates net operating income resilience. When one revenue stream softens, others can pick up the slack. For DST investors accustomed to single-stream rental income from apartments or NNN properties, this is a structurally different income profile.

Risks Every Marina Investor Should Understand

Marinas carry risks that investors coming from multifamily or industrial may not have encountered:

Is Declining Boat Ownership a Risk for Marina Investors?

It's worth noting that over the same decade that boat-owning households declined, total U.S. marina revenue grew over 70%, from $4.2 billion in 2014 to $7.2 billion in 2024.¹⁷ Fewer boats, but each one spending more on slips, storage, fuel, and services. The supply constraint (12 boats per slip) may matter more than the absolute number of boat owners. However, a prolonged decline in boat ownership could eventually impact demand, and investors should monitor these trends.

Marina Revenue in the U.S.: $4.2B (2014) to $7.28B (2024). Sources: FRED REVEF71393ALLEST (2014-2022); Research and Markets (2023); IBISWorld (2024)

The Mobile Home Park Playbook: Why Marinas Look Familiar

If this story sounds familiar, it should. Manufactured housing communities followed a similar trajectory.¹⁸ From the mid-1980s through the 2010s, mobile home parks were a fragmented, mom-and-pop asset class with stable occupancy, essentially zero new supply (cities wouldn't approve new parks), and sticky tenants. Cap rates were 10 to 12%.¹⁹

Then institutional operators moved in. Sam Zell founded Equity Lifestyle Properties in 1984 and grew it from 41 communities to more than 450 today.²⁰ Others followed, and the pace picked up in the 2010s, with three separate $2 billion-plus transactions between 2016 and 2018.²¹

Over those decades, cap rates compressed to roughly 5 to 7% for typical assets, with institutional-quality portfolios trading as tight as the mid-4s.¹⁹ Even today, the top 100 operators collectively own only about 4,000 of the estimated 43,000+ parks in the U.S.²¹

Could Marina Cap Rates Follow the Same Path?

The structural parallels are hard to ignore: fragmented ownership, barriers to new supply, sticky tenants, and high occupancy. The key difference is timing. Institutional capital only started entering the marina space around 2015. That's roughly 10 years of institutional activity in a sector that's still 70% independently owned.⁶ Manufactured housing had been consolidating for over 30 years by the time Blackstone's marina deal made headlines.

Of course, what happened in one asset class doesn't guarantee the same outcome in another, and marinas carry their own distinct set of operational and market risks that are different from mobile homes. But with more than 30 investment firms now actively scouting for marina acquisitions,¹¹ the consolidation wave is potentially still early.

How Anchor1031 Helps 1031 Investors Access Marina Investments

At Anchor1031, we track alternative asset classes like marinas alongside our core offerings in multifamily, NNN, industrial, and oil and gas. If you want to explore what's currently available across alternative asset classes, including marinas, you can browse our curated marketplace. And as always, if you want to talk through how any of this fits into your specific situation, we're happy to dig in.

Frequently Asked Questions About Marina Investments

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