Essentially, a boat slip is a parking spot for a boat, or even more similarly, it’s like a Recreational Vehicle (RV) pad for a boat. A marina builds a dock and then sections the dock into multiple slips, typically with mini-docks that are perpendicular to the main dock, so that parking spaces are created between the mini-docks.
The marina will charge you by the length of your boat for a yearly or monthly slip – e.g. a slip for a 25′ boat at the (fictional) marina rate of $20 per ft would be $500 per year, but a slip for a 30′ boat would be $600 for the year.
The boat slip itself is a relatively simple thing, but the mini-docks not only allows a marina to store more boats along the main dock, but allows the boat to be better moored to the dock – essentially from 3 sides, so that less rubbing between the dock and the boat occurs.
To be sure, there are many amenities that a marina can offer for the boat slip, which could be refueling services, cleaning services, allowing you to live on your boat, winterizing, or painting.
If you don’t have a waterfront property, but you want to get into boating, then you will probably need a boat slip, unless you want to store the boat on land and trailer it to a ramp every time you want to use it. I personally live in a very boating heavy state and county, so boat slips and marinas themselves are extremely common.
Therefore, there is a lot of competition and the prices for boat slips around here are likely lower than they are in many other parts of the country. In an effort to reduce the number of calls required to find a place to store your boat, the Micro Real Estate website has added them as a micro-property listing type. Since a boat slip is essentially a parking spot for a boat, and we already made a parking spot listing type, boat slips seem like a natural fit.
As far as the definition of a Micro-property goes, parking spots and boat slips are a little bit murky because they are not for installing a permanent piece of revenue generating equipment like an electric vehicle charger or a vending machine, however, parking spots and boat slips are small plots of land (or water) that generate revenue for their owner.
And again, just like with vending machines, the typical process of finding a boat slip involves calling several marinas to find if they have available slips and the cost of each of the slips. At Leptonic, Inc. we like efficiency, so upfront pricing and listings are key to efficient transactions – saving you and the marinas both time and money (because, hey, they’re the same thing, right?).
Are Boat Slips hard to get?
There is certainly a lot of demand for boat slips, but most large boating areas will have multiple marina’s (there are nearly 10,000 marinas in the US) and at least one of them is likely to have a boat slip available for you (there are over a million boat slips in the US). Now, not all boat slips are created equal, so the price of the boat slip can vary, along with the amenities that are provided.
Compared to parking spots, there are 2,000 time fewer boat slips than parking spots (there are over 2 billion parking spots in the US). There are about 15,000 RV parks in the United States, so I’d expect the number of RV pads in the US to be around 2 million, but that is just an educated guess.
