Lake and River Marina Feasibility Study for USDA B&I, SBA and Bank Loans

An inland marina on a Corps of Engineers, TVA or utility reservoir is a concession before it is a business, and the lease is the credit. MMCG Invest prepares lake and river marina feasibility studies for USDA Business and Industry, SBA 7(a), SBA 504 and conventional financing that read the concession instrument against the loan term, model the Corps rent at its graduated gross-receipts scale with fuel and rentals inside it, build covered-slip and rental revenue from posted lake rates, run the high-water, low-water and storm years as cases, and report the debt service coverage ratio (DSCR) by year with the lease conditions written for the lender's counsel.

Three-quarters of the questions on an inland marina file are about the landlord. The Corps of Engineers held 378 active concession operation leases in 27 states as of June 2022, collected about $12 million of rent in fiscal 2023, and charges rent as a graduated percentage of the prior year's gross receipts: 2.0 percent below $50,000, rising in tenths of a point to 4.6 percent at $5,000,001 and above, with the first lease year at 2.0 percent, fuel and sublessee receipts included, deductions limited to license fees, directly remitted taxes and pass-through metered electricity, and an optional flat 1.0 percent on boat and motor sales. GAO reported in July 2024 that the Corps had not documented any review of the scale since it adopted it in 1994; the Corps implemented a review process in March 2025, the House Oversight Chairman asked GAO in July 2026 to look again at how fuel and food are counted, and the MARINA Act, H.R. 7248, which would set 50-year initial and 25-year renewal terms and cap low-margin sales at 1 percent, is pending and not law. The lease form itself is governed by Engineer Regulation 405-1-12, which the Federal Register records as not available to the public, so term, encumbrance, lender cure rights and ownership of the docks at expiration are read from the borrower's own instrument and nothing else.

The public subleases MMCG has read show what that instrument does. Holiday Island's Table Rock sublease requires Corps approval of any transfer of a controlling interest, gives the District Engineer the right to review rates and require an increase or reduction, obliges the operator to move docks within a 909 to 917 foot pool range and to keep 72 hours a week from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and lets either party terminate on 30 days' notice if lake levels make operation impracticable. Kentucky's Paintsville Lake sublease requires a maintenance escrow of 2.5 percent of monthly gross receipts to a $50,000 balance, $5 million of liability cover with a $5 million umbrella, property at full replacement cost with the Corps as additional insured, and a CPA audit within three months of year-end. Those clauses are the model's conditions list. The general marina method, the SOP 50 10 8.1 rules and the rate panel are on the marina feasibility study hub.

The reservoir marina is the natural USDA Business and Industry borrower. A privately owned, for-profit marina is a tourist and recreation facility under 7 CFR 5001.105(b)(8); most Corps lakes sit in counties well under the 50,000 population line; there is no transient rule; and the term can run to 40 years or the useful life of the collateral. The binding clauses are the ones about the lease and the equity. Leasehold improvements are eligible only where the lease term is at least the loan term with no impairing reverter under 5001.105(b)(14), which is the clause the as-proposed file usually fails; a new business needs 20 percent balance sheet equity under 5001.105(d), 25 percent balance sheet equity where the guarantee issues before construction is complete; an acquisition is eligible where jobs are created or saved under 5001.105(b)(2); and a guaranteed loan above $1 million to a new business requires an independent feasibility study under 5001.306(a)(3)(i) to the components in Appendix A to Subpart D. Fiscal 2026 terms of an 85 percent guarantee under $5 million, a 3.0 percent initial fee and a 0.55 percent annual retention fee remain the published terms as of October 9, 2026. MMCG found no public B&I guarantee of a marina in Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kentucky or Tennessee; the nearest public precedent is a $10 million B&I guarantee to a rural Missouri campsite and wedding venue reported by the state office in 2026. See the USDA feasibility study page and the USDA regulatory spine.

SBA is the comparison. A reservoir marina with a large rental fleet, nightly covered slips and a transient store can approach SBA's rule that more than 50 percent of prior-year revenue come from transients staying 30 days or less, and the fiscal 2027 waiver of the 7(a) upfront fee on loans of $700,000 or less in rural counties makes a 7(a) fleet or working-capital piece cheap; but the annual-slip core of most lake marinas fails the rule on dockage, and the 7(a) cap of $5 million and the leasehold rules, which require the lease to run at least the loan term with an assignment and landlord's waiver, apply with full force to a Corps concession. The study shows the 7(a) case beside the B&I case and says which program the lease allows. The rules are on the SBA regulatory spine and the SBA 7(a) and SBA 504 pages.

Table Rock Lake in the Missouri and Arkansas Ozarks is the lake MMCG models because it has the deepest public record of any Corps lake. Its 2020 Shoreline Management Plan counts 15 commercial concessionaires with 4,375 wet and 380 dry slips, 86 resort leases with 1,701 slips and 13,356 private slips, sets a lakewide ceiling of 30,806 boat slips and launch-ramp parking spaces, and reserves marina buffer areas covering 10.1 percent of the shoreline for concessionaires' remote docks; the Corps counts more than 2 million visitors a year and ranks the lake third in the nation for fee collections. Posted covered-slip rates run $4.80 to $7.86 per foot per month on annual contracts, transient slips $25 to $40 a night, pontoon rentals $450 to $525 for a full day on a 20 to 26 foot boat and $665 to $765 for a 22-hour tritoon, ski boats and tritoons $649 to $729 for eight hours or a day, fishing boats $70 to $250. Cape Fair says it is full; Campbell Point is adding 50 wet slips in spring 2026; Kings River added 26 slips in 2024. All of those rates are posted prices, labeled as such, and the study obtains the subject's own rent roll before it sets a base.

The Corps rent is modeled as the formula states it, on all gross including fuel and rentals, in the tier the prior year's receipts put the marina in, with one tier higher run as a sensitivity because the 1994 scale is under review for the first time in thirty years. The maintenance escrow is modeled at Paintsville's 2.5 percent of gross as the public precedent. Revenue mix, fuel gallons and margin, store and food margins and rental utilization are not public for Ozarks concessions, and the study carries them from the operator's logs as flagged assumptions, with Paintsville's back-calculated gross of about $283,000 on 168 slips as the small-lake floor. The rental fleet is modeled as separately titled collateral on a five to seven year amortization, with the fleet age on the better lakes (Chateau on the Lake advertises 2023 and 2024 model-year tritoons) showing the replacement cycle the lender should expect. Houseboat, charter and livery bases follow the same structure, with the vessel financed under a preferred ship mortgage where it is Coast Guard documented and the state livery rules read for the lake.

Seasonality is written into the lease. Holiday Island's minimum hours run 72 a week from Memorial Day to Labor Day, 48 from April 1 and 45 to October 15; annual leases on Table Rock run May 1 to April 30 or by calendar year and are prepaid; Cape Fair's transient rate drops from $35 to $25 off season. The study models cash monthly and DSCR annually, and sizes the reserve to the winter.

Lake levels and storms are modeled as years, not as adjectives. Table Rock's seasonal conservation pool tops at 917 feet from May through November, the flood pool at 931 feet and the surcharge pool at 936; the lake crested at a record 935.47 feet on April 27, 2011 and at 933.22 feet in December 2015, and Bull Shoals set its own record of 696.51 feet in May 2011 above its 695-foot flood-pool design. The February 2012 Branson tornado destroyed four large docks at Port of Kimberling and damaged about 150 vessels; a July 2025 storm at Shell Knob flipped a dock and broke cables on at least seven more; a 56-knot gust damaged a Beaver Lake marina dock in March 2024. The Little Rock District requires encapsulated flotation on new commercial docks and replacement of existing flotation as it wears, and a 2009 Corps survey counted 42,546 encapsulated slips among 105,761 at 516 marinas; private docks follow 36 CFR 327.30 and the district appendix. The study runs a high-water season with docks moved and parking flooded, a low-water season with relocation, and a storm-loss year against the insurance deductible and business interruption cover.

Expansion runs through the shoreline plan and the district real estate office. New facilities must fit under the lakewide ceiling and within the marina buffer areas; a change of control needs the Real Estate Contracting Officer's written approval; no Ozarks approval timeline is public, and the Lake Cumberland lease signing of July 2017 was described by the Nashville District as the end of a long process, so the study carries six to twelve months for Corps consent as a flagged assumption. TVA Section 26a agreements and FERC-licensed shorelines such as Ameren's at Lake of the Ozarks raise the same questions on term, assignment and encumbrance, and the study reads the agreement rather than assuming it matches the Corps form. The evidence favors buying and expanding an existing concession over building a new one. The state pages for Missouri, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Kentucky carry the state requirements.

No public bid prices an Ozarks covered dock, and the study says so. Vendor and consumer ranges of $1,500 to $10,000 per slip and $15 to $35 per square foot describe residential product and are not used; the one trade-press datapoint, from the State Park Marina's operator in 2007, is that docks then cost more than twice what they had a decade earlier. The study prices covered steel-frame floating docks with encapsulated flotation, anchoring, gangways, the fuel system and the store from two or more Ozarks dock-builder bids and from the public records that do exist elsewhere: $49,600 to $100,000 per slip for in-water slips in Michigan, Ohio and California bids, $358,575 for a single-tank marina fuel system in Michigan and $28,362 for a pair of dispensers and a console, $35,000 for wash-water equipment where a service dock is added. A reservoir marina on a USACE lease usually has no land to buy; the purchase price of an existing concession is a leasehold going-concern value, and the three Table Rock sales since 2023, TopSide's Cape Fair and Hideaway (450 slips, 20 rental boats) and Campbell Point (280 slips) and Keel Funds' Kings River (192 slips), disclosed no price, so price per slip is an appraisal question. On a $2.5 million acquisition and expansion at 25 percent equity the guaranteed loan is about $1.875 million, the initial fee about $47,800 on the guaranteed portion and the first-year retention fee about $8,800.

The study reports DSCR as EBITDA less replacement capital expenditures over debt service, as 7 CFR 5001.3 defines it, by year against the lender's covenant, stated plainly as a covenant since Part 5001 sets no floor for a new loan, and MMCG models to the 1.25 times that lenders apply to SBA acquisitions unless the lender states another. The cases are the lake's: occupancy and rate by slip class, rental utilization and day rate, fuel gallons, the Corps rent one tier up, the high-water, low-water and storm years, and a rate-review case in which the District Engineer uses its reserved right to require a rate reduction. Break-even is stated in annual slips at the contract rate. Where the file is on SBA, the transient share is shown on dockage alone, on dockage plus rentals and fuel, and on dockage plus month-to-month contracts, with the determination resting on the reading the lender confirms in writing.

A MMCG lake and river marina study includes the program eligibility and equity test, the rural eligibility map check, the concession lease analysis with term, assignment, encumbrance, rate-review and lake-level clauses read for counsel, the visitation and registration market, the competitive census of every concession on the lake with posted rates, the slip and rental projection, the Corps rent and escrow at the formula, the operating projection, the dock and flotation cost from builder bids, the capital stack by program, the DSCR schedule by year, the lake-level and storm cases, the collateral discussion on the leasehold and the fleet, and a signed conclusion. Standard delivery is nine to sixteen business days; expedited delivery in five to seven is available. Fees begin at $4,900 for a single-site SBA 7(a) study and run $7,500 to $15,000 for USDA B&I and 504 studies. Revisions required by the lender or agency are made at no additional cost under MMCG's written acceptance guarantee. See MMCG's feasibility study methodology and where we work.

Ozarks reservoir concession marina under USDA B&I, Table Rock Lake: a 250-covered-slip acquisition and expansion that cannot be guaranteed on a lease shorter than the loan, restructured on a Corps lease extension, 25 percent equity, rent at the graduated scale and a flotation reserve. The coastal version is on the coastal marina feasibility study page, and the public-owner version on the public and municipal marina feasibility study page. MMCG's rural recreation work on the same program is on the RV park feasibility study and glamping and short-term rental feasibility study pages.