The Number That Sets Your Sausalito Floating Home's Rent Isn't the One on Your Offer
August 20, 2026
August 20, 2026
Two floating homes on the same dock, one listed at $1.4 million and the other at $2.6 million, can close with the exact same berth rent the following month. That isn't a coincidence and it isn't a pricing error. It's what happens when you actually run California's new floating-home rent formula, and it means the number most buyers assume matters most, the price on their offer, often has almost nothing to do with what they'll pay the marina every month for the rest of their ownership.
That is the part of Sausalito's floating-home market that the general buying guides tend to skip. They'll tell you a berth lease exists, that financing is specialized, that a marine survey matters. All true. What they don't walk through is the actual math behind Assembly Bill 754, the Marin-specific rent law that took effect this year, and why that math points buyers toward a different question than the one they're used to asking.
AB 754 rewrote how floating-home berth rent can change in two situations: every year, and at the moment a home sells. The annual piece is straightforward. Marina management can raise rent by the change in the cost of living, with a floor of 3 percent and a ceiling of 7.5 percent, and any inflation reading above 5 percent gets cut in half before it's applied. Predictable, and not where the interesting part lives.
The sale-triggered reset is where it gets specific. When a floating home changes hands under a qualifying long-term lease, the marina can set a new rent, but that new rent cannot exceed the lower of two numbers: a 25 percent increase over what the previous owner was paying, or 0.15 percent of the home's certified sale price. The statute requires the buyer to certify that sale price in writing, under penalty of perjury, so this isn't a soft guideline. It's the actual ceiling written into California Civil Code.
Here's why that produces the $1.4 million versus $2.6 million scenario. The two numbers only cross at a specific ratio: the price-based cap only becomes the binding one when the sale price is roughly 833 times the prior monthly rent or less. Below that ratio, the sale price sets your rent. Above it, the 25 percent figure does, and the sale price stops mattering at all.
Consider a hypothetical berth renting at $1,200 a month before the sale. A 25 percent increase brings that to $1,500. For the sale price to push the cap higher than that, the home would need to sell for roughly $1 million or more, since 0.15 percent of $1 million is $1,500. Once the price clears that threshold, and it does on nearly every floating-home sale happening in Sausalito right now given prices commonly running from the high six figures into the low millions, the 25 percent figure is the one that actually governs. The price-based cap sits so far above it that it never gets triggered.
The practical takeaway: in most current Sausalito floating-home transactions, what a buyer should ask isn't "what will my rent be based on what I'm paying," but "what is the seller paying today," because that number, times 1.25, is the realistic ceiling regardless of how the offer is structured.
This formula didn't appear out of nowhere. It's the second attempt at solving a problem the first attempt made worse. In 2022, AB 252 imposed vacancy control on floating-home berths across Alameda, Contra Costa, and Marin counties, meaning marinas couldn't raise rent at all when a home sold. It sounded protective, and for a market with only 42 floating homes in Alameda County and 11 in Contra Costa, the rule barely registered. Marin was a different story. The county holds 425 of the roughly 500 floating homes in the Bay Area, almost the entire market, and many of those berths had been on long-standing leases that predated the law, with rent realignments tied to sale that funded dock repairs and capital work.
AB 252's blanket rule cut that funding mechanism off. According to the Marin County Board of Supervisors' own account of the legislative process, some marinas responded by shifting existing tenants from 10- and 20-year leases down to 1-year terms and adding new fees to make up the difference, which created exactly the instability the original law was trying to prevent.
The fix took nearly three years to negotiate. The Floating Homes Association formed a Legislative Action Committee made up of residents from every Marin dock, and that group worked directly with marina owners rather than leaving the terms to Sacramento. Before the bill went to the legislature, the committee held twelve in-person dock meetings across the county's marinas and surveyed residents formally. More than 400 people responded, a 67 percent participation rate, and 93 percent voted in favor of the compromise that became AB 754. Governor Newsom signed it on October 10, 2025.
There's a detail in the statute that matters specifically for anyone transacting right now, in August 2026, and it's easy to miss because it was designed to be temporary. AB 754 includes a transition provision: any in-place transfer of a floating home occurring between July 1, 2025 and July 1, 2026 qualified for the dual-cap reset regardless of whether the home actually carried a 10-year-or-longer lease. That bridge window closed on July 1 of this year.
Going forward, the reset only applies if the floating home is on a genuine 10-year-or-longer lease, or was offered one within the two and a half years before the sale. If a berth is still sitting on one of the shorter, 1-year terms that some marinas adopted after AB 252, and it was never offered a qualifying long lease, the reset mechanism doesn't apply at all. That means the marina cannot raise rent at the point of sale, and the buyer simply inherits whatever the seller was paying, subject only to the standard annual CPI escalator.
For a buyer today, that's the first question to ask before writing an offer on any floating home on Richardson Bay: has this berth been converted to a 10-year-plus lease, and if so, when? The answer changes what your monthly cost actually looks like a year from now, and it's a document the seller or the marina office can produce, not a guess.
A few specifics worth pinning down with the marina directly, since terms vary by dock and by lease vintage:
None of this shows up on a listing sheet. It comes from a direct conversation with harbor management, and it's worth having before contingencies come off, not after.
None of this replaces the other diligence a floating home requires. Financing runs through a narrower lender pool than a standard home purchase, with institutions like Bank of Marin and Cooperative Center Federal Credit Union among the names that regularly work this niche, and buyers should expect larger down payments, often in the 20 to 25 percent range, shorter amortization schedules around 20 to 25 years, and rates that run a point or two above conventional financing. A documented, recently inspected hull remains one of the highest-value things a seller can hand a buyer, since a well-documented float system can carry a real premium over a home where hull condition is uncertain. Berth position matters too. Deep-water berths that clear the mud at low tide and end-of-dock positions with open views both tend to command a real premium over interior slips on the same dock.
Across the community's docks, from Waldo Point Harbor at the north end of Richardson Bay to Yellow Ferry, Issaquah, Main, South Forty, and the Kappas piers, none of that changes. What's different now is that the rent math finally has a clear, published formula behind it instead of a one-size-fits-all rule that never fit Marin in the first place.
Does AB 754 apply to every floating home in Sausalito? It applies to floating home marinas in Marin County generally, with a carve-out for berths that are deed-restricted as affordable housing. Confirm your specific berth's status with the marina rather than assuming.
If I'm buying a home whose lease isn't yet 10 years, can the marina just convert it at sale to trigger a reset? The statute requires the qualifying long lease to already exist, or to have been offered within the prior two and a half years. A marina converting a lease at the moment of sale specifically to trigger a reset would not meet that timing requirement.
Is the sale price cap ever the one that actually applies? Only when the sale price is low relative to the prior rent, roughly under 833 times the monthly rent. In today's Sausalito price range, that scenario is uncommon, which is exactly why the 25 percent figure, not the purchase price, is the number worth tracking.
Floating-home transactions carry enough moving parts that guessing at any of these numbers is a bad habit to start. If you're looking at a berth on Richardson Bay and want someone to walk the lease history and the math with you before you write an offer, reach out to Nicole Burton for a Marin waterfront consultation built around the specifics of the dock you're actually considering.
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