Sausalito Floating Home Market Report

Every figure below comes from the closed-sale record for Sausalito's floating home community, the same data a lender's appraiser pulls, arranged so an owner can find their own dock in it.

The report is in two parts, because people arrive with two different questions. If you are thinking about buying or selling in the next few months, the first part is the one that matters. If you want to know what owning one of these homes has done over a lifetime, skip to the second.

Where the year stands

Fourteen homes had closed by 1 September, against a ten-year average of 10 for the same point in the year and a best of 15 in 2021. This is the second-busiest start to a year in a decade. It has also already outsold all of 2025 — that year closed with 8 sales total, and 2026 passed that count over the summer, with four months still on the clock. The headline and the detail underneath it point in different directions, though. The median sale price is up about 6% on last year, and one home on Liberty Dock closed at $2,900,000, the second-highest price in the whole thirty-two-year record and the highest since 2021. But the typical home this year sold for 92% of what it first asked, and exactly one of 13 sales went above asking. Homes are still selling, just below the number their owners started with.

Every sale that closed this year

Sorted by closing date. Days on market is as reported at close.

Scroll sideways to see every column.

Fourteen sales is the whole year's supply across roughly 420 berths. The spread runs from $620,000 to $2,900,000, and the median price per square foot came in at $1,058. Median berth fee reported on these sales was $1,499 a month, paid to the marina on top of the purchase price. Shopping for a houseboat right now? See Sausalito houseboats and floating homes for sale, or read what to look for.

What is on the market right now

Aggregate figures only, for homes listed and unsold as of 4 September 2026.

We publish these as aggregate figures rather than a list of individual homes. Advertising another broker's listing requires that broker's permission under BAREIS Rule 13.3, and we do not have it. Aggregate asking figures use the original list price as reported at the time of export.

Three decades in four numbers

This market has produced roughly 6.8% a year compounded since the mid-nineties. It also fell by about a third between 2007 and 2011, and took until roughly 2015 to make that back.

Median sale price, every year since 1994

Median of all closed sales in each calendar year. 2026 is partial, through 4 September 2026.

Three distinct eras show up in that line. Through the nineties a floating home was a cheap, unconventional way to live on the water, and the median never cleared $325,000 before 2001. The 2000s roughly doubled it and then gave a third of it back. Since about 2014 the line has climbed steeply and unevenly, with the sharp single-year jumps you get when a market this small happens to trade a few large homes in one year.

A year with eight or nine sales tells you almost nothing on its own. 2023's median of $1,245,000 looks like a spike; it rests on nine transactions. Read the shape across five years, never the step between two.

How thin this market has always been

Closed sales per year. 2026 is partial.

The long-run average is about 17 sales a year, but almost no individual year sits there. Volume has run from 7 sales (2009) to 40 (2004), and 6 of the last thirty-two years came in under twelve. The trend is downward: 19.3 a year through the nineties, 18.4 in the 2000s, 16.3 in the 2010s, 15.4 since 2020. The berths are fixed, no new ones are being permitted, and the people who live here tend to stay.

The home you want probably is not for sale today, which makes waiting a real strategy.

The same market, decade by decade

Medians across each period rather than single years, which smooths out the small-sample noise.

Berth fees were not consistently recorded on listings before about 2004, which is why the earliest period shows none.

Cash took over

Share of closed sales paid in cash, by period.

In the late nineties, roughly one in eleven of these homes was bought with cash. Today it is more than two in three.

A floating home sits on leased water and does not fit a conventional mortgage box, and over thirty years bank after bank has quietly stopped writing them. The effect compounds. Fewer lenders means fewer financed buyers, which means sellers increasingly need a cash buyer, which thins the pool at every price point and shows up as the long days on market in Part One.

It is also why 39 sales in this record were financed by the seller. When a bank will not lend, sometimes the seller does. If you are selling a home that lenders will struggle with, carrying paper is worth pricing out, and it widens your buyer pool more than a price cut of the same size would. We handle floating home financing directly, which is why we track this column at all.

Berth fees have outrun the homes

Median monthly space rent reported at time of sale.

At today's median that is about $16,884 a year on top of purchase price, insurance and hull maintenance, and unlike a mortgage payment it does not stop when the home is paid off. Any real estimate of what a floating home costs to own has to start here.

Dock by dock

Closed sales from 2015 onward only; older sales predate the current character of most docks. Docks with fewer than four sales are grouped out.

The range column tells you more than the median one. The spread within a single dock is far wider than the gap between docks. Liberty has closed sales from $375,000 to $2,972,500. Hull condition, berth position, light and lease terms move a price more than the address does.

What the same home sold for twice

99 homes in this record sold at least three years apart. This holds the property constant, which no median can.

Long table; scroll to see it all. 33 of these homes have traded three or more times since 1994.

The median annualised gain across these 99 homes is 7.9% a year. (The mean is 8.7%, which is the figure a spreadsheet gives you by default and the reason we state the median.) Treat the largest multiples with suspicion. A home bought as a project and resold after a gut renovation shows a return that includes every dollar spent on it. At the bottom of the table are homes that resold flat or down, which is what deferred hull and systems work looks like when it finally comes due.

What sitting on the market costs

Every closed sale measured against its own original asking price, grouped by how long it took to sell.

The decline is unbroken across 570 sales, and the gap between the fastest and slowest groups is 12.2 points — about $132,289 on a home at today's median.

The causation runs backwards from how it looks. Homes do not lose value because they sat; they sat because they were priced above what the market would pay, and the eventual discount is the market collecting the difference. By the time a listing is in the third row of that table the outcome is largely decided. The number you choose in week one is the number that matters.

What a home bought back then is worth now

Median sale price in each period against the median today ($1,082,500). Median against median throughout — mixing an average into either side inflates the answer.

This is a market-level figure, not a promise about any particular home. It compares the middle of one period to the middle of another, so it carries none of the condition, berth or renovation differences that decide what an individual home actually fetches. Read it alongside the same-home table above, which holds the property constant and lands lower.

The full year-by-year table

Every year on one screen, with the underlying numbers behind the chart.

Where these numbers come from

Source is BAREIS MLS records for floating homes in Sausalito, California, covering 1994 through 4 September 2026: 571 closed sales plus 9 homes actively listed at publication. Pulled and analyzed by Roman Bergeron. Paul and Roman were personally involved in a meaningful share of them.

What is included: every closed sale reported to BAREIS, including deals negotiated off-market and recorded afterward. What is not: transfers never reported to the MLS, family transfers, and sales handled entirely outside the local brokerage community. We removed 21 records recorded below $10,000, which are berth transfers rather than sales, and 3 further records whose reported sale price could not be reconciled with their own list price — two 2013 sales entered at roughly 1,000 times their asking price, and one 2019 sale entered at a tenth of it. One further record was a duplicate — the same 2002 sale at 60 Liberty Dock filed twice — and only one copy is counted.

Read the small samples carefully. Dock-level and single-year figures often rest on fewer than ten sales. We use medians throughout, because one $2,972,500 sale distorts an average badly at this size. Square footage comes from the listing as entered and is not independently verified; berth fees are as reported at the time of sale and will have moved since.

We refresh this page quarterly. The next update is due January 2027. If something here does not match your own records, tell us and we will check it.