One evening after a birthday party aboard a friend’s cruiser, Arthur Salus found himself tantalized by the aroma of grilled steaks wafting from the houseboats they passed on the way back to the dock.
“And it hooked me,” says Salus, who owns a travel agency near Atlanta. “I said, `That’s what I need. At this point in my life I want to make my life simpler, not more complicated, and enjoy things.’ “
He and his wife, Donna, began researching the vehicles and discovered that most houseboat manufacturers in the U.S. are clustered in southern Kentucky, in a 30-mile stretch around Lake Cumberland. After comparing the products, the couple plunked down more than $200,000 for a custom 16- by 80-foot Sharpe 99 with four bedrooms, two full baths, a complete kitchen, a bar and a high-end Boze sound system.
Most weekends, and often during the week, the Saluses lounge on Sea Dawg in Lake Lanier in northern Georgia.
“Because I’m in the travel business, I could just get on a plane and go just about anywhere I want to go,” Salus says. “But I wanted a place I could be within a half-hour to escape and relax. We wanted something that was big that we could at least stand up in and walk through without being claustrophobic. (A houseboat) gives you all the amenities of home.”
Thanks to a thriving economy, houseboat production has doubled in the last five years to $400 million annually. The 4,000 houseboats assembled each year range from enclosed pontoons that sell for $30,000 to half-million-dollar mega-yachts.
“Over the past 10 years there’s been a pretty steady climb in the high end of the houseboat market,” says Steve Smede, editor of Houseboat magazine, published in Idaho Falls, Idaho. “But when you look at the small- to medium-level boats–from $35,000 to $75,000–in the past few years, we’ve seen that really catch up. At this point, we’re seeing the whole industry booming at once.”
According to Smede, whose publishing company also manages the Houseboating Association of America, there are about 35 companies in the U.S. that make more than 10 houseboats per year. Unlike most products, houseboats are sold directly to consumers, not through dealers.
Houseboat building began in the U.S. in the 1950s, when a young high school graduate named Jim Sharpe talked his father into displaying some Johnson outboard motors in the showroom of the family’s hardware store.
Lake Cumberland was being created by the Army Corps of Engineers as a reservoir and part of the Mississippi River flood control system, and the budding entrepreneur had a hunch that small fishing boats would soon be in demand.
He was right. By the late 1960s, the Sharpes were producing flatbottom boats for customers along the Ohio River. The fiberglass runabout became a hot seller, too, but it fell by the wayside when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began cracking down on high-emission production techniques of the fiberglass vessels. And the houseboat, which had for years lagged far behind the smaller, faster watercraft, came into its own.
Today, most of the top manufacturers of custom-built, aluminum mono-hulls have dropped anchor in rural Kentucky, near Tennessee.
One manufacturer, John Sturgill, who has had a passion for houseboats since he and his high school buddies strapped an old Trailways bus body onto a raft and some 55-gallon drums, left his Virginia funeral home business in 1996 to begin Fantasy Custom Yachts Inc. in Monticello, Ky. The company, which grossed $10 million in 1999, has expanded several times and now employs 220 people.
“This is a dream come true,” says the 44-year-old Sturgill, who owns a $650,000, 112-foot houseboat, one of the largest on Lake Cumberland. “It wasn’t an overnight decision; it was something I had wanted to do for several years.
“There’s a ready-made market here,” he adds. “There are experienced craftsmen who know how to build the boats. The suppliers are here.”
According to a 2000 economic development study of the Lake Cumberland boat-building industry by the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development, the sales generated by the 10 manufacturers between Monticello and Somerset, Ky., totaled $87.5 million in 1999.
A large percentage of customers are also from the Southeast, where lakes tend to be calmer.
“The craft we build is not for rough water,” Sturgill points out. “It’s not for coastal use. It’s strictly for freshwater, inland, protected lakes. I class our boats as floating condos.”
The West is another growing market, says Joe Sharpe, president and CEO of Sharpe Houseboats and son of the industry’s founder. (Jim Sharpe, now 70, has retired.)
“Arizona’s a real big state,” says Sharpe, whose 100 employees painstakingly build four custom houseboats each month. “We’re even invading Mexico now. And at the big boat show up in Louisville recently, I saw more response from California, Oregon and Idaho than I’d ever dreamed. There’s water all over this great United States, and there are areas we haven’t even touched yet.”
Shapre said that includes mid-America. He said his company hoped to break into Wisconsin, Nebraska and Upper Michigan. Illinois’ hot spots are on the Illinois River, Lake Shelbyville and Carlyle Lake.
The typical customer is a professional or small-business owner in the South, Midwest and Southwest, according to the Houseboating Association of America. The average age is 50 with incomes in the six figures. Most are entrepreneurs who have flexible schedules and money for expensive toys.
But there has been an influx of people with young families looking to escape the rat race on weekends and retirees who live in their “cabins on the lake.”
“It used to be that nobody had a houseboat unless they were very well off,” Sharpe says. “But this day in time, a lot of them are financed. People are starting to enjoy their wealth a little early instead of waiting till they have their nest egg built.”
The average houseboat sells for $200,000 to $300,000 and takes three to four weeks to build–after getting through the six-month waiting list, said Sharpe.
The largers ones have aluminum hulls, with fiberglass the material of choice for smaller vessels. The interiors are real hardwood.
The most expensive boat the Sharpes have built was a 100-foot double-decker with a second-story game room, full-size pool table, eight-person hot tub and rooftop party deck. The first floor featured bleached (tickled) maple; the second was all mahogany. The customer was from Kentucky and he bought the boat about four years ago for $800,000.
According to Smede of the houseboat association, decked-out boats can include fireplaces, indoor Jacuzzis, top-deck pool tables, enclosed gazebos, dumbwaiters, wide-screen TVs and in-motion satellite tracking dishes. One customer ordered a portal window in the hull so he could flip up the floor board and watch the fish.
The most expensive custom aluminum lake houseboat Smede knows of is a Stardust Cruiser moored on Kentucky’s Lake Cumberland. Price tag: more than $2 million.
Before buying, new owners need to make sure their vehicles are allowed on the water.
“It’s one of the biggest issues in the houseboat industry right now,” Smede says. “There are certain states that restrict transportation of anything wider than 16 feet. Tennessee is a perfect example. (If you’re driving) anything wider than 16 feet, they’ll make you turn around and go back to wherever you came from. There are some pretty creative routes that people have to use to skirt different states.”
Illinois does not restrict the size–width, length, etc.–of houseboats or other vessels, though it does limit motor sizes, according to Officer Bill Pickett of the Division of Water Resources at the states’ Deptartment of Natural Resources.
According to the houseboat association, slip fees, maintenance and gasoline can run from $200 to $1,000 per month, depending on locale, with Chicago at the high end. Sharpe estimates that it costs about $100 an hour in fuel and maintenance to operate one of his houseboats and that insurance costs are comparable to those of a nice house.
A few manufacturers offer a “captain’s school” training program to teach customers how to maneuver the vessels. And, says Salus, good dock neighbors are a must.
“I was showing off one day,” he admits. “And when I brought it back in, there were eight houseboats on my dock. This wind came and everybody started yelling at me, `Thrust this! Turn this! Move this!’ And I just knew I was going to run right into those boats. My boat actually turned, and they all had to go out on their boats and push me off. One of my neighbors jumped on and said, `All you have to do is just back it up.’ “
