About The Floating Residence
A category misunderstood, not a lifestyle that needs selling.
For decades, “liveaboard” has been treated less as a housing category and more as a stereotype. Boats themselves fare little better in the popular imagination — often viewed as expensive toys, depreciating assets, or lifestyle indulgences rather than serious residential infrastructure. The result is that floating living is frequently dismissed before it is ever evaluated on its actual merits.
The Floating Residence exists to evaluate floating living as a housing, financial, and lifestyle system — one that has been largely overlooked by conventional real estate analysis.
The Core Thesis
Floating living is not only about what you spend. It is about what you do not lock away.
The capital not spent on a traditional down payment does not disappear. It can be invested — in a REIT, in the market, in a business, or in something that compounds — while still delivering waterfront access most land-based buyers cannot touch at the same price point.
That is a housing systems decision, not a romantic one. Almost no one is evaluating it that way.
Founder Philosophy
Lived on the water. Trained to put a number on it.
I grew up summering in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, running a 15-foot Boston Whaler that I owned into adulthood, and working as crew and deckhand on Cap’n Fish’s excursion boats. From 2000 to 2018, I owned or leased property across four states — a home in Cape Elizabeth, Maine; a townhome in North Conway, New Hampshire; a 4,500-square-foot home in Austin, Texas; a townhome in Kemah, Texas; and a ski condo in Aspen, Colorado. I was in a lease-to-own arrangement on a townhome in Longmont, Colorado when, instead of buying, I made the leap to liveaboard life. In 2018, I moved aboard a 35-foot Meridian, where I’ve lived ever since — six-plus years now, full-time, in Santa Barbara Harbor.
That gives me something most people evaluating this category don’t have: eighteen years of direct, lived experience on the traditional real estate side, followed by six years living the floating-residence alternative myself. I know what conventional housing actually costs — across primary homes, townhomes, and a vacation property, in four different markets — not from a spreadsheet, but from owning it. And I know what the floating-residence alternative actually requires, because I chose it over buying again, and I’ve lived it for six years since.
I also hold an MBA from Northeastern University, which gives me the framework to put a number on what most people in this space only describe in vibes: capital allocation, opportunity cost, and the actual tradeoffs between a slip and a mortgage.
Anyone can romanticize floating living. Few people evaluating it have eighteen years of real estate ownership, six years of lived liveaboard experience, and the analytical training to model what it actually costs you — and what it frees up — financially.
The Floating Residence Method
Floating living cannot be evaluated through boat specifications alone.
A vessel is only one part of the decision. The marina, the slip, the operating costs, the surrounding market, the resident’s lifestyle needs, and the long-term financial tradeoffs all matter. The Floating Residence uses proprietary assessment frameworks designed to evaluate floating living as a complete residential system — not simply as a boat purchase.
Floating Livability Score
Evaluates whether a vessel can function as a practical, comfortable, and sustainable residence.
Marina Residence Index
Assesses the marina environment, infrastructure, access, policy realities, and residential suitability.
Vessel Habitability Rating
Reviews layout, systems, storage, climate control, maintenance exposure, and day-to-day living functionality.
Nomadic Water Living Assessment
Examines mobility, flexibility, regional tradeoffs, seasonal use, and the viability of a more fluid residential model.
Safety and Community
The part of this decision that financial analysis alone misses.
As a single woman who has lived aboard for years, I have come to see a dimension of floating living that gets almost no attention: safety.
A gated marina, with a small and relatively stable population of neighbors who notice when something is off, has felt safer to me than the alternatives often presented as comparable “freedom” lifestyles — a high-rise apartment in an unfamiliar building, or full-time van life on the road.
That is not a formal claim that every resident is vetted. It is a structural reality: fewer people, more repetition, more familiarity, and daily visibility into who belongs and who does not.
Marinas tend to function differently than many modern neighborhoods. Daily interaction on the docks is normal, not exceptional. People notice each other, and that has value a square-footage comparison will never capture.
The assumptions around floating living deserve scrutiny — not automatic dismissal.
One of the most persistent assumptions is that children need a yard, and that a boat is therefore incompatible with family life. In practice, plenty of young families live aboard successfully. That does not mean it is right for every family, but it does mean the assumption deserves to be tested.
What The Floating Residence Explores
Floating living is larger than boating.
Housing Reconsidered
How rising housing costs, waterfront scarcity, and shifting lifestyle priorities are reshaping where and how people live. The real comparison is not only monthly cost. It is what becomes possible with the capital that a smaller down payment leaves available to invest elsewhere.
Waterfront Access
Marinas, dock systems, harbor infrastructure, and the evolving realities of coastal access as residential infrastructure — not simply recreational storage.
Community and Safety
The social and security dimensions of marina life that rarely appear in conventional housing comparisons, evaluated honestly rather than romantically.
Floating living is not a fringe lifestyle.
It is a housing systems decision.
The Floating Residence
Reconsider home.
The Floating Residence builds the case — market by market, slip by slip — that floating living is not a romantic escape and not a fringe lifestyle. It is a housing systems decision that deserves the same rigor applied to any major financial choice, evaluated by someone who has lived it, worked it, and trained to model it.