AUSTIN, Texas — Boat sales are booming during the age of COVID-19, and it has the boating industry working to keep up with the demand.
Freedom Boat Club has seen the impact of people interested in getting out on the water. The international boating club allows people to take out from a selection of boats for hours at a time.
Interest in becoming a member at locations across the country started to escalate when the pandemic forced shutdowns last March. Freedom Boat Club of Austin experienced record growth in 2020 and it’s already outpacing membership sales in 2021 as the local community prepares to take advantage of peak boating season.
“We're currently only letting people in when people leave, but fewer and fewer people are wanting to leave,” Bill Marquardt, co-owner of the boat club’s franchise locations across the Austin area said. “It's a good and bad thing.”
At his clubs alone, there are around 500 to 600 members with more than 100 people on the waiting list.
Brantley Brokaw and his family’s decision to join the club two years ago ended up coming at the right time.
When the pandemic hit, they started going to the Rough Hollow location on Austin’s Lake Travis, more than twice their normal amount.
“The family that we joined the boat club with also doubled their reservations as well,” Brantley Brokaw said. “I was working a lot more hours working from home. We definitely needed to cut loose and just get out on the water.”
It’s a trend Marquardt has seen since the pandemic started.
“I would ideally like to just expand, add slips and add boats, but unfortunately in Austin every single Marina in town is on a waitlist,” Marquardt said.
To add additional members, he has to supply more boats. He says the problem is there’s nowhere to store additional boats on Lake Travis or Lake Austin. Due to demand, there’s currently about a one to two year waiting period before someone can purchase a boat slip.
While he says that’s unique to the Austin area, there’s a similar boating boom happening across its Texas and national locations.
“We saw the same demand in Dallas, but there weren't as many people I think moving to the area buying boats,” Marquart said. “It was still drastically different. Every single boat club, at least in the freedom area, experienced huge growth last year. More members than any other previous year.”
Buying a boat can also take time. According to the National Marine Manufacturers Association, boat sales across the country rose to a 13-year high in 2020 and is expected to continue rising through this summer. It also found an average of 31,000 new boats sold every month since the summer of 2020.
“Normally, we purchase our boats and make the ordering decisions in October for spring deliveries,” Marquardt said. “This year, we made them in January for next spring, so that we could have enough boats to flip our inventory, which we do every couple of years.”
If you have any story ideas or are interested in