Marinas Bite the Big One

[Bycrick]

Your horse subsidy payments have been applied to your EPA bill for sustainable disposition of horse****. Please try again next year.

[smj]

NW Creek Marina in New Bern has just been purchased by a corporation. I wonder what will happen if and when we have a major real estate correction as we did in 2008?

[PirateFoxy]

Originally Posted by Bycrick

Your horse subsidy payments have been applied to your EPA bill for sustainable disposition of horse****. Please try again next year.

Figures. 🤣

[Bycrick]

Smj — I suppose one could hope that a "corporation" has enough assets to ride out the correction. Look at what happened with COVID. The big guys had enough assets to ride it out. The small businesses didn’t. Maybe an argument against "small, family-owned" marinas.

[JoetheCobbler]

Ten or 12 Year ago I was looking for dockage on the. FL east coast from St Augustine to Cocoa and then, The rate was about $15 ft on an annual contract and more for short term.
The same story was being told- big corp buying out marinara for condos and super yachts.
In my searches for a slip met and old fishing captain who managed a small private Marina in St Augustine.
He saids, Just be patient, it'll cycle to lower rates again.
He was correct.

It did drop off about a third

So, it's cyclical and economy driven

[JoetheCobbler]

Free market and supply and demand work well.

[Adelie]

A truly free market tends towards monopolies.

[Bycrick]

Adelie — Of course it does. Economies of scale and market control make it almost inevitable. What gets in the way is that the sheep ultimately get tired of being sheared. Somehow, they fight back, politically if possible or by smashing the looms. Or the monopoly gets big, sloppy and lazy and somebody new comes along. It’s cyclical. US Steel. RCA, AT&T, IBM, the railroads about 1900. Today's evil giants might be Facebook, Amazon, Google. But that too will change.

An ugly example, a couple of weeks ago, I saw a box in the restaurant kitchen. On the side, it had a long paean about how the company had been in business for 100 years. Had practically invented radio and television, and all the parts thereof. "They were a household word all over the world." The box was for an air fryer, made in China. The brand name was RCA. Sic transit Gloria mundi.