Roman's Story

The docks were his first job site. Before he held a license, Roman was building floating docks for neighbors so families could step out onto the water from their own back door, and helping keep the walkways, floats and gangways in working order. It is where he learned what a float does under load, and why two homes that look alike on a listing sheet can be very different to own.

So we took it apart ourselves, just the two of us, with no crew. Wall by wall and load by load, we stripped it all the way down to the barge. That is the part of a floating home almost nobody sees: the concrete hull, the stem walls, and the places where water had worked its way in over the decades.

Heres the entrance to the finished house. Not many agents have taken a houseboat down to its barge. We have, and we rebuilt it with our own hands.

Roman Bergeron has lived on the water his whole life. He has studied every Sausalito floating home sale reported since 1994 through an economist's lens, and put in the hours to know these homes the way a builder does.

That's Roman, circled, among his three brothers at the yearly king tides on East Pier. He has been wading these waters since the day he was born. He grew up on Gate 6½ and East Pier and the neighbors that used to see him every day now call him about their homes.

Then came a whole house. This is the houseboat as it stood when we took it on during Covid: before Paul and Roman took a sawzall and diamond tipped blades to the 1/4 inch steel boat

Then we built it back up, framing a brand-new home piece by piece on the water.

After studying economics and psychology at Claremont McKenna and working in consulting in San Francisco, Roman earned his California real estate license. Floating homes are his specialty, but he works in other Bay Area communities as well.

He recently represented the buyer in an $8.6 million multifamily purchase in San Francisco's Marina District.