Our canal home in Delray Beach: four bedrooms, a dock, and what it earns

We are a family of four from Connecticut and we bought our house in Delray Beach in 2019. It is a four-bedroom home on a canal in Tropic Isle, with a pool and a dock with a lift, two bridges from the Intracoastal. We paid $1.35 million, with a mortgage, and the plan from the start was that guests would pay most of it while we used the house on school holidays.

Why this house

The water. Guests who come to Delray want to be on a boat, and a house with a dock is a different product from a house without one. People bring their own boat down on a trailer, or rent one for the week, and the lift and the quick run out to the Intracoastal are the first thing they ask about. Atlantic Avenue is a seven-minute drive, so they get the restaurants and the beach without staying on top of them. Four bedrooms means two families can share the cost, which is how a lot of our bookings come together.

The numbers

In a normal year the house is booked about 70% of the time, roughly 255 nights. Our rates run from the mid $300s in the summer to the high $800s over the holidays, and the blended average is about $520 a night. That is around $133,000 in gross rent.

That covers the mortgage, the property tax and the insurance, with utilities, pool, lawn and pest control running about $1,100 a month on top. In a good year there is something left over. In 2023, when the whole coast went soft, there was not, and we lowered the summer rates rather than let the house sit empty. The point is that the house carried itself even in a weak year.

What surprised us

The seawall. We had it inspected before we closed and it needed work, which we negotiated into the price. A friend who skipped that step on a house nearby found out two years later and it cost him a great deal. On a canal house, the seawall, the dock pilings and the lift motor are as important as the roof, and salt water is hard on all of them.

Things break, and on the water they break faster. Budget for a dock or lift repair every few years, service the air conditioning twice a year, and keep a reserve. We put aside part of every month's rent so a repair is never an emergency.

We managed the house ourselves for the first year, from Connecticut, through a listing site. It worked, but every call about a lost key or a pool pump came to us at the dinner table. Handing it to a local team was the single biggest improvement in our experience of owning the house.

The guests

Mostly families and boating groups, and almost all of them careful. Delray is not a party town, and the agreement every guest signs before arrival sets expectations clearly. In seven years we have had one stay we would not repeat and dozens we would welcome back tomorrow.

Would we do it again?

Yes. The house is paying itself down, the kids think of it as theirs, and we have a dock on a Florida canal that costs us very little to keep. That is what we wanted.