If you're selling waterfront this year, list before the boat show

Almost everything I have written here has been for buyers. This one is for the other side of the table, and specifically for the hardest version of it: you own waterfront, you want to sell, and you want to end up on different water in the same area.

That is a genuinely difficult transaction, and the timing of it is the part people get wrong.

The window is open right now

Season is starting. The snowbirds are arriving, the town is filling up, and at the end of this month the Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show puts more people with boats and money in this market than any other week of the year.

Think about who that is. Someone who flies in for the boat show is, by definition, a person for whom a boat is a priority worth travelling for. That is the exact buyer for a waterfront house with a dock. They are already here, they already have the weekend blocked out, and a fair number of them will spend part of it looking at real estate because they are standing in the market anyway.

The conventional advice is to list after the new year, when season is at full strength. I would rather you be on the market before the boat show than after it, because being listed is what lets you catch the traffic that is already coming. A house that goes live in February missed this entirely.

The part that actually stops people

Here is what I spend most of my time on with sellers who are also buying: you cannot comfortably commit to the next place until this one is sold, and that creates a genuine bind.

Buy first and you are carrying two waterfront properties, which is two mortgages, two insurance premiums, two sets of dock maintenance, and two tax bills. On waterfront in this market, that is not a small cushion to float.

Sell first and you have money and no house, in a market where the specific thing you want, the right canal, the right bridge route, the right depth at the dock, does not come up every week.

I will not pretend there is a trick that removes that tension. What there is, is sequencing. Knowing what you are looking for before you list, so that when your sale moves you are not starting your search from zero. Knowing which canals actually work for your boat before a house comes up on one, so you can move quickly on the right listing instead of carefully on the wrong one. The people who handle this well are the ones who did the second half of the work before the first half closed.

That is most of what I am useful for in this situation, and it is work that happens months before anything gets listed.

Your buyer will ask things they did not ask five years ago

I had a conversation recently with a buyer relocating from New York. He owns property up there, he understands flooding, and what he wanted to know was how seawalls work down here. Not whether the house was nice. What the wall was, how high it sat, and what happens if it needs work.

That is a more informed question than most buyers were asking a few years ago, and you should expect it from whoever buys your house.

The thing worth understanding as a seller is how the rule actually works. Broward sets a minimum elevation for tidal flood barriers, and it is an absolute elevation measured against a survey datum, not a number of feet added to whatever is there now. The standard steps up over time, with one figure required in the nearer term and a higher one later.

What matters for you is the trigger. Ordinary maintenance is ordinary maintenance. But once work crosses the threshold the county treats as a substantial repair, which is based on how much of your shoreline is involved and what the work costs relative to the wall, you are no longer patching. You are bringing the wall up to the current standard.

So a seawall that has been quietly deteriorating is not just a repair bill. It is a repair bill that can convert into a replacement at code elevation, and a buyer who understands that will price it into their offer whether or not you have priced it into your asking.

I am not telling you to go rebuild your seawall before you list. For plenty of properties that is the wrong call financially. I am telling you to know which category yours is in before a buyer’s inspector tells you, because the version of that conversation where you already know the answer goes very differently from the version where you do not.

What I would do if you are thinking about it

Find out where your wall actually stands, from someone who looks at it rather than from the listing you bought the house with. Get clear on what you want next, specifically enough that you would recognise it in a listing. And if being on the market for the busiest few weeks of the year appeals to you, the time to start that conversation is now rather than in January.

If you are anywhere in this process, even if selling is still a maybe and the timeline is next year, pick up the phone and call me. I am happy to talk it through with no expectation attached, and I would rather help you think about sequencing early than meet you after the hard part is already decided.