Dane Faber keeps a vintage wooden trawler at Pelican Harbour, the 90-slip marina tucked along Sausalito's working waterfront. In July, a letter arrived raising his monthly slip rent from $1,100 to $2,600, effective in October. His assigned parking space went from $100 a month to $200. Faber is an attorney. He told the Press Democrat he intends to fight it in court, and that he can afford to when many of his neighbors cannot.
What makes the number worth repeating isn't the dollar figure. It's the timing. Seven weeks earlier, the Sausalito City Council had already said no to exactly this kind of change of hands at Pelican Harbour. The rent letters went out anyway.
A Marina Changed Hands the Week the City Said No
In mid-May, the council voted to deny a tidelands lease transfer that would have let Cameron Razavi, who already runs the neighboring Bridgeway Marina, take over Pelican Harbour. Boaters had testified against the deal, citing complaints about his management record at Bridgeway. The $13.4 million purchase needed that lease to close, and the council's denial should have ended it there.
It didn't. On July 1, notices appeared at the harbor office announcing that Razavi would be the new harbormaster and that rent would continue flowing to the same entity as before, Pelican Harbour Associates LP. The longtime owners hadn't transferred the tidelands lease itself. They had sold their partnership interests in the entity that held it, a maneuver their attorney later confirmed to the city in writing. The harbor's longtime harbormaster and maintenance staff were let go the same week.
Rob McCollough, who has lived at the harbor for 26 years, put the objection to the council plainly: a decision the elected body had just made was being worked around through a technicality. Mayor Steven Woodside said afterward that the council had directed the city attorney to explore potential legal action, both over the transaction itself and over protections for tenants facing the rent increases. As of this writing, that exploration is still underway, and the October rent effective date is still on the calendar.
"It was clearly done with an objective of thwarting the city's ruling," Faber told the Press Democrat. "There was nothing subtle about it."
The Clause That Wasn't There
Here's the mechanism, and it's worth sitting with because it isn't unique to one marina. Pelican Harbour's tidelands lease with the city runs through 2040. According to the sellers' own attorney, that lease contains no change in control provision, no clause requiring city consent when the ownership entity itself changes hands rather than the lease being formally assigned. A council vote can block an assignment. It has no power over a partnership sale if the underlying lease never anticipated one.
That gap is the entire story. It's not a loophole engineered by one operator so much as a blank space left in a decades-old lease, one that a buyer with legal counsel found and used. Any waterfront lease in Sausalito without that specific language is exposed to the same maneuver, regardless of how the slips underneath are used.
What Marin's Floating Home Rent Law Actually Covers
Marin County's roughly 425 floating homes, nearly all of them moored in Sausalito's five marinas, and far more than the 42 in Alameda County or the 11 in Contra Costa County, sit under a different and genuinely protective statute: AB 754, signed into law in October 2025 and effective January 1, 2026. It passed the legislature without a single no vote, after Marin's Floating Homes Association surveyed residents directly. More than 400 people responded, a 67 percent turnout, and 93 percent backed the compromise.
What AB 754 actually regulates is worth being precise about, because the precision is where the buyer protection lives and where it stops.
| AB 754 covers | AB 754 does not cover |
|---|---|
| Annual berth rent increases, capped to the change in cost of living, with a floor of 3% and a ceiling of 7.5% | Who owns the marina or how ownership can be transferred |
| A special formula for rent resets when a floating home itself is sold, capped at the lesser of 25% over the prior rate or 0.15% of the sale price | Whether a tidelands lease requires city consent before a change in control |
| Fee transparency, requiring marina owners to show utility and incidental charges reflect actual costs | Continuity of harbor management or staff |
| Protections running through 2038 for Marin specifically, longer than the statewide framework it amended | Public review of a marina sale structured as a transfer of ownership interests rather than an asset sale |
AB 754 was built to answer one question: how much can my rent rise once I already own the home. It says nothing about who is allowed to own the marina under that home, or what happens when that ownership changes overnight. That question belongs to a completely different document, the tidelands lease itself, and Pelican Harbour shows what happens when that document is silent.
Why This Matters Even If You're Not Buying a Boat Slip
If you're evaluating a floating home purchase along Richardson Bay, the natural due diligence question has been "does AB 754 apply here." It does, countywide. But that question alone would have told a Pelican Harbour resident nothing useful this summer, because the mechanism that changed their monthly cost had nothing to do with rent caps. It ran through a lease provision that was never written.
The practical version of the question a buyer needs to ask is narrower and harder to get answered from a listing sheet: does the marina's tidelands lease include a change in control clause, and if so, what triggers it. That single line of legal language determines whether an ownership sale requires the same public review the rent increase itself does not.
Before You Write an Offer on a Sausalito Floating Home
- Ask for the actual tidelands lease, not a summary, and look specifically for change in control or assignment language, along with the lease's expiration date.
- Ask how many times the marina has changed operators or ownership, and whether any of those changes drew city council review.
- Confirm the current moorage or berth lease terms in writing: the CPI schedule under AB 754, whether rent resets on sale, and whether the lease is transferable to you as the new owner.
- Ask how long the current harbormaster has held the role. Staff turnover during an ownership dispute is often the earliest visible sign of instability.
- Check whether any pending city correspondence or council action touches the marina. Sausalito's council meeting minutes are public record.
The Market Underneath the Story
This kind of diligence carries more weight in Sausalito than it might elsewhere because the market itself is thin enough that one marina's trouble doesn't average out. Citywide, only 13 homes sold in Sausalito in May 2026, down from 16 the month before, and the median sale price swung from roughly $1.04 million in April to $1.71 million in May, a jump driven almost entirely by which few homes happened to close rather than any broad shift in value. A market that moves that much on a dozen transactions is a market where the condition of a single lease can matter as much as the condition of the home itself.
Within the floating home niche specifically, price still tracks dock and condition closely. A unit at 10 E Pier sold for $1.21 million in February 2026. One at 16 Main Dock brought $1.125 million in November 2025. A smaller one bedroom at 37 South Forty Dock sold for $645,000 in July 2025. The spread has always come down to deep water access, dock position, and the age of the float. What Pelican Harbour adds to that list is the health of the lease underneath the dock, a factor no listing photo will show you.
A Few Common Questions
Does AB 754 protect me if the marina I buy into is later sold to a new owner? It protects the rent you pay on your home, within the CPI-based caps described above. It does not require city approval of a marina ownership change unless the tidelands lease itself contains a change in control clause.
Is the Pelican Harbour situation resolved? Not as of this writing. The Sausalito City Council has directed its city attorney to explore legal options, and the rent increases at the harbor are set to take effect in October 2026.
Does this apply outside Pelican Harbour? The mechanism, a tidelands lease silent on ownership transfer, could exist under any Sausalito marina's lease. It's a document worth reading before you buy, not after.
Waterfront property in Sausalito rewards patience and punishes assumptions, and the lease sitting underneath a floating home is rarely the part a buyer thinks to ask about first. Stephanie Pratt has spent more than two decades working these docks and hillsides and knows which questions to put in writing before an offer goes in. If you're weighing a floating home or any waterfront purchase in Sausalito, schedule a private consultation or request a confidential home valuation to start with the diligence that actually protects you.
