Marina Management Services and Fee Guide

By Gary E. Wilson, President & Designated Broker, Wilson Management, Inc.

Owners looking at third-party marina management usually open with the fee. It is the wrong first question, because the percentage only means something once you know what it covers — and marina agreements vary more in scope than almost any other property type.

A marina can be moorage only, or moorage plus guest berthing, plus a boatyard, plus retail or commercial space, plus fuel. Each addition changes the operating burden substantially. Two managers quoting the same percentage on facilities with different scopes are not offering the same thing.

This is how these agreements are typically structured and what to establish before signing.

Fee models

Percentage of collected revenue is the most common. The manager earns a percentage of what is actually collected rather than billed, aligning them with collections rather than merely with occupancy.

Percentage with a monthly minimum is common at smaller facilities where a pure percentage would not support managing the site properly.

Base fee plus incentive appears where an owner wants to tie part of the compensation to defined performance — occupancy, revenue growth, or net operating income against budget. Workable where the measures are objective and agreed in advance.

The revenue base matters as much as the rate. Establish specifically whether it includes annual moorage, guest and transient moorage, liveaboard premiums, boatyard and haul-out revenue, storage, utility recharges, fuel sales, retail, and any commercial rents at the site.

Fuel in particular is worth isolating. It can be a large gross number at a low margin, and including it in a percentage-of-revenue base without adjustment produces a fee disproportionate to the work.

What is normally included

• Slip leasing, waitlist administration and moorage agreements
• Rent and moorage fee collection, billing and arrears follow-up
• Rate setting and review by size band
• Guest and transient moorage administration
• Tenant relations and rules enforcement
• Routine dock inspection and maintenance coordination
• Vendor sourcing and supervision
• Environmental compliance administration and record-keeping
• Utility administration, including shore power recharges
• Insurance certificate tracking for tenants and vendors
• Monthly financial reporting

What is normally excluded and billed separately

• Maintenance and repair costs themselves, as distinct from coordinating them
• Capital projects — dock and pile replacement, dredging, upland works
• Diver inspections and specialist marine surveys
• Legal costs, including derelict vessel matters
• On-site staffing, where the facility has any
• Insurance premiums, taxes, leases and licence fees
• Permit application costs and consultant fees
• Marketing spend above any defined baseline

Capital is the big one. Marina capital is lumpy and expensive — a dock replacement is a different order of magnitude from a roof on a commercial building — and how it is scoped, procured and supervised should be addressed explicitly rather than assumed to fall inside the management fee.

Boatyard scope needs its own treatment

If the facility hauls out or performs vessel work, that is effectively a second business with its own staffing, scheduling, revenue model, safety profile and environmental compliance burden.

Establish whether the management scope includes yard operations at all, how yard revenue enters the fee base, who employs or supervises yard labour, who carries responsibility for lift operation and maintenance, and how the environmental compliance obligations attaching to yard activity are administered.

A marina agreement drafted for moorage and then applied to a facility with a working yard will not fit.

Term, termination and transition

Initial term is commonly one to three years for marinas, longer than typical for other asset classes because the operating relationship takes time to establish and seasonal patterns take a full cycle to learn.

Termination. What notice, whether either party may terminate without cause, any early termination fee, and what happens on a sale of the facility.

Transition is worth settling at the start. Who holds the tenant records, the waitlist, the moorage agreements, the inspection and condition history, the compliance records, and the access system credentials — and in what form they are handed over.

The condition and inspection history deserves specific mention here. At a marina that record is genuinely valuable: it is what makes capital planning possible, and reconstructing years of pile and float condition data is not practical. An owner who cannot obtain it from a departing manager loses something that cannot be bought back.

Reporting to expect

Monthly, at minimum:

• Occupancy by size band, not facility-wide
• Rates achieved by band against asking
• Waitlist depth by band
• Move-ins, departures and guest moorage activity
• Arrears, aged
• Income and expense against budget
• Maintenance completed and items tracked toward replacement

Facility-wide occupancy is the number most likely to be presented and least likely to be useful. A marina at 96% may be full of long slips and empty of short ones, and those two situations call for opposite decisions.

Questions to ask before signing

Fee

• What exactly is in the revenue base, and is fuel treated differently?
• Is there a minimum, and does it bind at our size?
• Any other fees — setup, technology, transaction, marketing?

Scope

• Does this cover the boatyard, and on what basis?
• What is billed separately, and who approves it?
• Who manages capital projects, and is that inside the fee or additional?

Operations

• How are rates reviewed, and by band?
• How is the waitlist administered, and can tenants see the rules?
• Who administers environmental compliance and holds the records?
• What is the inspection cycle, including underwater?

Relationship

• Term, notice, and what happens on a sale
• Who owns the tenant data and the condition history, and how is it handed over?

Comparing proposals properly

Because scope varies so widely at marinas, comparing on percentage alone tells you very little. Build a projected annual total for each proposal instead: the fee on its defined revenue base, plus everything that agreement excludes and bills separately.

Then look hard at the revenue projections underneath. A manager forecasting growth should be able to say where it comes from — closing the gap between asking and achieved rates in specific size bands, filling slips that have sat empty, converting waitlist demand into repriced tenancies, monetising guest moorage that is currently unmanaged, or recovering utility costs that are presently absorbed.

A projection that arrives as a percentage with no mechanism behind it is a sales figure. One with a mechanism can be tested against your own occupancy and rate history.

It is also worth asking what happens if the projection is missed. The answer will not be a guarantee, and it should not be — but it reveals whether the manager treats their own numbers as a commitment or as marketing.

Self-managing a marina

Some owners run their own facility well, and the honest comparison is not fee versus no fee.

Marinas are administratively heavy in ways that are easy to underestimate: continuous enquiry handling, a waitlist that decays if nobody maintains it, seasonal guest moorage, arrears, insurance certificates that lapse silently, environmental records that only exist if someone keeps them, and an inspection cycle that produces nothing visible and prevents dock closures.

The specific capabilities that are hard to replicate alone are rate management by size band, which requires watching several small markets rather than one; inspection-led capital planning, which requires a condition record maintained over years; and vendor leverage with a limited pool of specialist marine trades whose demand concentrates in the same seasonal windows for everyone.

For a small facility with an owner on site daily, self-management can be entirely rational. For a larger one, an owner who is not local, or a facility with a working yard, the arithmetic usually favours professional management — but it should be run rather than assumed.

What a manager should be adding

The fee is worth paying where the manager produces more than it costs. At a marina that comes mostly from four places:

Rate management by band, since demand is uneven across sizes and uniform per-foot pricing under-earns at the popular lengths.

Waitlist administration that holds up, which removes a permanent source of conflict in a community where everyone talks.

Inspection-led capital planning, which turns dock replacement from an emergency closure into a sequenced, funded programme.

Environmental compliance run as a daily practice with the records to evidence it.

An agreement producing none of those is expensive at any percentage.

Where to go next

Our Marina Management page sets out what we cover, and Slip Leasing and Waitlists and Dock, Pile and Float Maintenance go into the two areas that most affect returns.

To discuss your facility, contact us or request a free analysis.