The Moorings Has Two Housing Markets Hiding Under One Address
Pull up the current listings in The Moorings and the math stops making sense almost immediately. As of early September 2026, the neighborhood carries 114 active listings with an average asking price of $3.1 million. But the typical Moorings home, the one with three bedrooms, three baths, and roughly 2,362 square feet, prices out closer to $2.6 million once you apply the $1,088 average price per square foot that anchors that comp set. That's a gap of nearly half a million dollars between what a "typical" home should cost and what the neighborhood's average is actually reporting.
The gap isn't a data error. It's the fingerprint of a neighborhood that now runs on two separate pricing logics at once, and if you're comparing The Moorings to Park Shore or Coquina Sands using a single average or median, you're comparing an incomplete number to an incomplete number.
Averages get pulled by their tails, and The Moorings has a long one on the top end right now. The listing spread in that same September snapshot runs from a $240,000 entry-level condo to a $12.3 million estate. Layer in the neighborhood's newest address, 3300 Gulf Shore, and the tail gets longer still. That project's current listings range from roughly $3.9 million to $10.4 million, with the developer's original pricing starting at $3.7 million and running as high as $23 million for the largest residences.
A relatively small number of transactions at that altitude will drag an average well above what most buyers are actually paying, which is exactly what's happening here. The typical Moorings home hasn't gotten dramatically more expensive. A handful of new-construction properties have simply raised the ceiling so high that the average now describes almost nobody's actual purchase.
The clearest physical evidence of that ceiling is sitting on a 3.07-acre parcel at 3300 Gulf Shore Boulevard North, between the Gulf of Mexico and Doctors Bay. For decades that site held the Executive Club, a four-story condominium built in 1969. Hurricane Ian damaged the building badly enough in 2022 that it was demolished in 2023.
In early 2025, Kolter Urban acquired the site for $92.5 million and began building two eight-story towers holding just 51 residences, ranging from about 2,000 to more than 7,500 square feet. The project broke ground on January 29, 2026, and Forbes named it one of the defining projects in Naples' evolving luxury market that February. Amenities include a private 16-slip marina on Outer Doctors Bay, two resort-style pools, and a wellness center with a cold plunge and spa. Sales are handled by William Raveis Real Estate.
What matters for a buyer's math isn't the amenity list. It's the trade being made on that parcel: a 53-year-old building with 1969-era bones and no meaningful storm resilience came down, and in its place rose a structure built to modern flood elevation and wind codes, with a price floor nearly four times the neighborhood's typical per-square-foot rate. That's not appreciation in the usual sense. It's a different product occupying the same address.
While 3300 Gulf Shore resets the top, a quieter and more common transaction is happening at the other end of the neighborhood. The Moorings was largely built out in the 1950s and 1960s, and a lot of that original housing stock is now being purchased specifically to be torn down. Local builders describe teardown-rebuild projects on established Moorings lots replacing older cottages with new custom homes running 3,500 to 7,000 or more square feet.
In that kind of purchase, the listing price isn't really describing the house. It's describing the lot, the canal frontage, the proximity to Moorings Bay, and how much of the existing structure the buyer plans to keep, which in a lot of cases is none of it. A buyer evaluating an older Moorings listing at $1,088 a square foot needs to ask a different question than a buyer looking at a move-in-ready new build: not "is this priced fairly for what's here," but "is this priced fairly for what I'm about to build here."
That distinction is easy to miss if you're scanning listings by price per square foot alone, because the metric assumes the square footage you're buying is the square footage you'll live in. In a meaningful share of Moorings transactions right now, it isn't.
| Legacy Resale | New Construction / Rebuild | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical age | 1950s-1980s original stock | Built 2023-2026 or in planning |
| What you're pricing | Land, canal frontage, location | Structure, flood elevation, current codes |
| Representative range | Roughly $240,000 to low seven figures | Mid seven figures to $23 million (3300 Gulf Shore) |
| Buyer's real decision | Buy to rebuild or renovate | Buy the finished product |
| Governing question | What's the lot worth? | What's the amenity and construction package worth? |
The neighborhood's headline average sits somewhere in between these two tiers, which is precisely why it doesn't describe either one well.
If you're cross-shopping The Moorings against Park Shore or Coquina Sands, the useful comparison isn't the neighborhood average. It's tier against tier. An older canal-front home priced near land value in The Moorings should be weighed against similarly positioned rebuild candidates in Coquina Sands, not against a finished new-construction condo at 3300 Gulf Shore. And a buyer set on new construction with marina access should be comparing 3300 Gulf Shore's per-square-foot economics to other ground-up luxury product, not to a 1960s ranch three streets over.
A few practical markers help sort a listing into its actual tier before you ever schedule a showing. Year built is the first signal. Anything from the original development era, largely the 1950s through 1980s, is a candidate for the land-value conversation even if it's been nicely maintained. Lot size and canal frontage matter more than interior finishes in that conversation, since those are the features that survive a teardown. On the new-construction side, look for flood elevation detail and recent permitting history. Those specifications, not square footage alone, are what separate a genuinely new build from an older home with a cosmetic refresh.
The Moorings' central location between Coquina Sands and Park Shore, its deep-water canal system with Gulf access through Doctors Pass, and its private beach park through the Moorings Property Owners Association remain constants across both tiers. What's changed is that a single average price can no longer tell you which version of the neighborhood you're actually being shown.
Is The Moorings a gated community? No. The Moorings is not gated and doesn't have a single mandatory homeowners association, which is part of why the neighborhood mixes such a wide range of home vintages and price points on the same streets.
Do all Moorings properties include private beach access? Beach access runs through the Moorings Property Owners Association, which manages the private Moorings Beach Park. Membership is separate from property ownership, so it's worth confirming with any specific listing rather than assuming it's automatically included.
Is buying a home to tear it down actually common in The Moorings? It's common enough that local builders describe it as a defined category of transaction in the neighborhood, distinct from renovation. Given how much of the original housing stock dates to the 1950s and 1960s, a meaningful share of current sales are being evaluated primarily on lot and location rather than the existing structure.
If you're weighing a legacy Moorings property against new construction like 3300 Gulf Shore, or trying to figure out which tier a specific listing actually belongs to, that's exactly the kind of read I do for clients before they ever put in an offer. Reach out to Holly Fagan to talk through where a property sits in this market, or request your personalized home valuation to see how your own Moorings property compares across both tiers.
Let Holly guide you through your home buying journey, contact me today!
