Beaufort, SC, for a Home Buyer: Robert Smalls' Town, the Swing Bridge and the City Limits

On May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls and an enslaved crew took the Confederate steamer Planter out of Charleston harbor and handed it to the Union blockade waiting outside. He was 23 years old. He had been born on April 5, 1839, behind the house at 511 Prince Street in Beaufort, and when Congress awarded him $1,500 for the Planter, he used the money to buy that house (Wikipedia: Robert Smalls House; PBS). He served in the U.S. House from 1875 to 1879, spent nearly 20 years as Collector of Customs at Beaufort, and is buried at Tabernacle Baptist Church, where a bronze bust stands near his grave (U.S. House History). The house on Prince Street has been a National Historic Landmark since 1974. The National Trust for Historic Preservation bought it in November 2023, and under a December 2024 agreement with Historic Beaufort Foundation it stays a residence, opened for limited tours (National Trust).

Beaufort is a city of about 15,800 people on Port Royal Island, and a Beaufort address can mean downtown and the Historic District, Lady's Island across the swing bridge, or Habersham and Burton. The Census Bureau counted 15,775 people in the city on July 1, 2025, up 15% since 2020 (U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025). The town was chartered on January 17, 1711, second in South Carolina only to Charleston. It was named for Henry Somerset, the 2nd Duke of Beaufort, and laid out around a fort built in 1706 against Spanish attack (South Carolina Encyclopedia). It is pronounced BEW-fert here, and the Beaufort in North Carolina is BOH-fert (WCNC).

I'm Jeff Moran, NMLS #483943, a mortgage broker licensed in South Carolina through C2 Financial Corporation, and I have been in the mortgage business since 1996. I work from Bluffton, south of the Broad River, and the Hilton Head-Bluffton area page covers the whole region. Beaufort gets its own page because a Beaufort address can be inside the city or well outside it, and that one fact changes the tax bill, the flood discount and the wind coverage on the same home. Everything below is what I could confirm as of October 1, 2026, with the source beside each fact.

The 1850s homes still standing in Beaufort, and the reason they survived

On November 7, 1861, a Union fleet won the Battle of Port Royal, and the white residents of Beaufort left town. Federal troops marched in on December 5, 1861. Because the town was taken that early, it escaped the burning that other South Carolina towns went through. Many of the big houses on The Point were used as Union hospitals and officers' quarters instead (The Mariners' Museum; Civil War Traveler). Tidalholm, which Edgar Fripp built in 1853 as a summer house, was Union Hospital No. 7. In the summer of 1982 it was the house at the center of The Big Chill, after it had already appeared in The Great Santini (Explore Beaufort SC; LOCAL Life). Marshlands, built between 1810 and 1814 for Dr. James Robert Verdier, has been a National Historic Landmark since 1973 (SC Picture Project).

The whole 304-acre Historic District went on the National Register in December 1969 and became a National Historic Landmark in 1973. It runs from Boundary Street on the north to the Beaufort River and its marsh on the east and south, and to Hamar Street on the west (Wikipedia: Beaufort Historic District). Boundary Street got its name because the city's northern limit moved there from Duke Street in the first decade of the 1800s (Historic Beaufort Foundation). If you buy inside the district, the City's Certificate of Appropriateness review comes before any addition, renovation, demolition or site work, and the area page explains it.

A downtown address puts all of this within a few blocks of your front door. On Bay Street, the John Mark Verdier House at number 801 dates to 1804 and is run by Historic Beaufort Foundation, and the Beaufort History Museum is in the Arsenal at 713 Craven Street. A block away, the Old Beaufort Firehouse at 706 Craven Street is the visitor center for Reconstruction Era National Historical Park. The park began as a national monument in January 2017 and became a national historical park on March 12, 2019 (Wikipedia: Reconstruction Era National Historical Park). Pat Conroy moved here as a teenager in the 1960s and wrote The Water Is Wide and the first chapters of The Great Santini in a house on Hancock Street (AJC). The Pat Conroy Literary Center at 601 Bladen Street is free and open Thursday through Sunday from noon to 4 (Pat Conroy Literary Center). North of Boundary Street, Pigeon Point is laid out around Beaufort National Cemetery at 1601 Boundary Street. President Lincoln designated it on February 10, 1863, one of the first national cemeteries, and more than 28,725 people had been interred there as of 2024, including about 1,700 African American Union soldiers (Wikipedia: Beaufort National Cemetery). The streets of Pigeon Point wrap around those grounds.

Waterfront Park, the swing bridge and the Spanish Moss Trail

Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park, at 103 Charles Street, was begun in 1975 and opened in 1979, and much of it is built out over the Beaufort River on pilings (Beaufort History Museum). Its 1,200-foot promenade has been closed since the summer of 2025, after an engineering analysis found many of those pilings eroded. In 2026 the city's Waterfront Advisory Committee chose a plan to rebuild the platform, replace the pilings and raise the structure about 8 feet. The City estimates the work at three to five years (WTOC, April 23, 2026; WTOC, October 2, 2025). The festivals below still run in the park.

The Richard V. Woods Memorial Bridge carries US 21 Business from the foot of downtown across the river to Lady's Island. It opened on December 17, 1959, replacing a 1927 swing bridge, and its 248-foot span still turns on a center pivot to let tall boats through, with an operator's house in the middle (Wikipedia: Richard V. Woods Memorial Bridge; ABC News 4). It is named for a Highway Patrol trooper killed in the line of duty in 1969, and it went on the National Register on January 6, 2023. SCDOT maintains it, and after electrical faults from salt exposure closed it without warning, SCDOT put $500,000 into repairs, including new traffic gates (ABC News 4). It is the daily drive between Lady's Island and downtown, and when it swings open for a boat, traffic waits on both sides until the span closes again.

The Spanish Moss Trail, a paved rail-trail on the old Port Royal Railroad bed, reached downtown on February 12, 2026. That is the day the Downtown Beaufort Connector opened, from the Depot trailhead along Depot Road and across Ribaut Road to Bay Street (Beaufort County; WSAV). The planned full length is 16 miles, from Sands Beach to the Whale Branch River. The Beaufort River here is part of the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway, at about Mile 536, with downtown on its west side (NOAA Coast Pilot 4).

The Beaufort festival calendar: Shrimp, Gullah, Water and Film

The Beaufort Shrimp Festival, in its 32nd year, runs October 2 and 3, 2026 at Waterfront Park, Friday from 5 p.m. and Saturday from 11 a.m., with free admission and food tickets sold on site (Beaufort Shrimp Festival). The Rotary Shrimp Race drops 5,000 rubber shrimp off a shrimp boat into the river. The Light Up the Night Holiday Boat Parade is on the City calendar for December 5, 2026, from 5 to 8 p.m., at the park (City of Beaufort calendar). The Beaufort International Film Festival, presented by the Beaufort Film Society, lists its 21st edition for February 16 to 21, 2027, downtown (Beaufort International Film Festival). Those dates came from the organizer's listing, and I would confirm them with the festival before planning a trip around them.

Two festivals come back every year on fixed weekends. The Original Gullah Festival was founded in 1986 to recreate the atmosphere of Decoration Day, the holiday that became Memorial Day, and it runs Memorial Day weekend at Waterfront Park with free entry. The 41st was held May 22 to 24, 2026 (Original Gullah Festival; WTOC). The Beaufort Water Festival grew out of 1930s sailboat racing on the Beaufort River, held its first official festival in July 1956, and held its 70th on July 17 to 26, 2026 (Beaufort Water Festival; ABC News 4). The Pat Conroy Literary Festival held its 10th in late October 2025, and the center's own calendar is the place to look for the next one.

New apartments, Whitehall, Cane Island and the shops that have opened

Several apartment complexes are going up or have opened on the Beaufort side of the county. The Island Packet counted five complexes adding more than 1,600 units, and some of the sites it listed are along Boundary Street and Robert Smalls Parkway (Island Packet via Yahoo). Two are on Boundary Street, the way into town: Pintail Pointe with 84 units and Carrington Manor at 2247 Boundary Street with 64 units for residents 55 and older. The Preserve at Hanover Park is at 139 Robert Smalls Parkway, Garden Oaks at 2000 Salem Road adds 288 units, and Pointe Grand on Burton Hill Road adds 328. Pointe Grand opened on January 9, 2026, with nearly all of its units two-bedroom, two-bath rentals (WTOC). The City's project list dated March 1, 2026 adds Pine Court Apartments, 60 units in five buildings on Pine Court South (City of Beaufort, Current Projects 03-01-26).

On Lady's Island, the corner at the foot of the Woods Bridge is changing too. Whitehall is the 10-acre plan there that the City's planning commission approved in December 2020, with townhomes, single-family homes, river homes, garden cottages and three mixed-use buildings (Explore Beaufort SC). The first of those mixed-use buildings, a café with two apartments at 119 Whitehall Drive, already has its permit on the same City list. A home there is next to a neighborhood that is still being built.

The largest plan on the Lady's Island side is Cane Island, where up to 700 homes and a five-story hotel could go on about 380 acres of Upper and Lower Cane islands. The plans proceed under development agreements from the 1990s and early 2000s that require only City administrative review, with no Planning Commission hearing. City Council did pass a resolution, sent to state regulators, opposing one plan to line part of the shoreline with riprap, the loose rock that gets piled along a bank to hold it against the water (Island Packet via Yahoo). The same reporting put Lady's Island Drive at about 28,000 vehicles a day. If you are looking near there, the City's planning office can tell you where the approvals stand today.

Most of the big-store shopping on this side of the county is at Beaufort Station, the shopping center on Robert Smalls Parkway just south of Parris Island Gateway. Morgan Company developed it, and this is where most of your errands would land. Groceries are at the ALDI at 361 Robert Smalls Parkway. For the home itself you have HomeGoods and Hobby Lobby, and for clothes T.J. Maxx, Ross and Old Navy, with Ulta, Five Below and PetSmart in the same center (Explore Beaufort SC; ALDI). Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers opens there on October 13, 2026, the first in this part of the state (Explore Beaufort SC). The Kitchen, whose original location is on Lady's Island, plans a second, grab-and-go spot next to Surcheros near ALDI in late 2026 or early 2027 (Explore Beaufort SC).

Closer to a downtown home, Beaufort Baking Company was aiming for a fall 2026 opening at 211 Scott Street, next to Blackstone's Café (The Island News). Olive Branch Café, a Mediterranean place from the Urban Brew team, opened February 10, 2026 on Ribaut Road across from Beaufort Memorial (Explore Beaufort SC). If Lady's Island is your side of the river, Sweetgrass Baking Co., a mother-daughter bakery, opened August 4, 2026 at 2 Merchants Lane off Sams Point Road (Post and Courier).

Boundary Street, the Lady's Island roads and the November transportation tax

Boundary Street, the way into town on US 21 and SC 170, was rebuilt in a $33 million project. It ran just over a mile from Neil Road to Sycamore Street at City Hall and realigned the intersection with Robert Smalls Parkway. The money came from the county's penny sales tax, a federal TIGER grant and a City tax-increment district, and the work was celebrated as finished in 2018 (WTOC). A tax-increment district sets aside the growth in property tax collections along a corridor to pay for improvements there. In July 2019 City Council ended its Boundary Street redevelopment effort and repealed the corridor ordinance (WTOC). So if you are looking near Boundary Street, the road work is done, and the apartments going up there are private projects rather than part of a City plan.

On November 3, 2026, Beaufort County voters decide on a one-cent transportation sales tax of about $780 million over up to nine years (Beaufort County Penny). The projects that touch Beaufort:

• Ribaut Road corridor, $28.4 million
• A peanut-shaped roundabout at Lady's Island Drive and Meridian Road, $8.2 million, to fix the offset between Meridian Road and Islands Causeway
• A turn lane at Ribaut Road and Lady's Island Drive, $4.8 million
• Resurfacing on US 21 from Gardens Corner to the Woods Bridge, plus Lady's Island Drive and Ribaut Road, $46.7 million
• Resurfacing on Robert Smalls Parkway from Boundary Street to SC 462, $42.1 million
• Sea Island Parkway from the Lady's Island Walmart area to the Harbor Island bridge, $11.7 million
• Sams Point Road from Sea Island Parkway to the roundabout, $5.32 million

On September 8, 2026, Beaufort City Council voted 3 to 2 for a resolution recognizing the county's transportation needs without endorsing or opposing the tax (The Island News). Because it is a sales tax, it does not show up on a property tax bill.

The 2018 penny tax set aside $30 million for nine projects on US 21 and SC 802 across Lady's Island. In August 2022 the county's Public Facilities Committee voted to widen Sea Island Parkway to four lanes with a landscaped median from the Woods Bridge to Sams Point Road (Beaufort County). Please ask the county where that stands before you plan around a timeline.

Schools, the hospital and MCAS Beaufort

The Beaufort County School District broke ground on May 22, 2026 on a replacement for Lady's Island Middle School. The new building is 84,000 square feet, next to the current school, built for 500 students and expandable to 800, and it is expected to open in January 2028 (WTOC; Beaufort County School District). The same day, Beaufort High broke ground on a 10,875-square-foot career and technical building behind the school off Sea Island Parkway, for construction trades and public safety, opening in August 2027. Beaufort High itself, founded in 1970, is at 84 Sea Island Parkway on Lady's Island, so the city's namesake high school is across the swing bridge from downtown. Beaufort Middle is at 2501 Mossy Oaks Road and Beaufort Elementary at 1800 Prince Street. The district's current attendance map is the one to check for any address.

The University of South Carolina Beaufort traces its historic campus to the 1795 charter of Beaufort College. The Greek Revival Beaufort College Building on Carteret Street dates to 1852, USC's first regional campus opened there in 1959 with 82 students, and the USCB Center for the Arts is at 805 Carteret Street (USCB). The Technical College of the Lowcountry's Mather campus at 921 Ribaut Road covers 49 waterfront acres (TCL).

Beaufort Memorial Hospital, at 955 Ribaut Road, is licensed for 201 beds, and it is renovating and expanding its Surgical Pavilion with two new surgical suites, backed by about $18 million in federal funds (Beaufort Memorial). The new VA clinic is going up at 1844 Ribaut Road in Port Royal, and the area page covers it.

Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort is home to the F-35B squadrons VMFA-224 and VMFA-533 and the training squadron VMFAT-501, and a $79 million F-35B hangar opened there on July 7, 2022 (MCAS Beaufort). A 2022 study put the air station alone at 7,253 jobs and $787 million in economic impact (SC State Library). If you are buying on orders to the air station or as a veteran, how VA loans work in South Carolina covers entitlement, the funding fee and what the attorney closing changes.

Addresses inside the City of Beaufort and addresses outside the city limits

A Beaufort mailing address covers a lot of ground that is outside the city, so this is where the homework starts. The Historic District, bounded by Boundary Street, the river and Hamar Street, is inside, and that takes in The Point and the Northwest Quadrant, the part of the district around Bladen Street (The Island News). Lady's Island is mostly unincorporated, outside any city or town, and the in-city part is mainly the commercial strip on Sea Island Parkway near the Woods Bridge. The City annexed parcels there such as Butler Marine and the Fillin' Station to smooth its boundary, since Grayco, Walgreens and Publix were already in the city (The Island News). Habersham was approved by Beaufort County as a planned unit development, which is a neighborhood planned and approved as one package under its own master plan. It is on the county's zoning map, so it is in unincorporated Beaufort County (Beaufort County, Habersham PUD). Burton, with 6,777 people in 2020, carries a Beaufort address and is a census-designated place, the Census Bureau's name for a community with no town government of its own. So it is unincorporated too. For Pigeon Point, Mossy Oaks and Royal Pines, I did not find a boundary source either way. The City's own City Limits map is where to look, and the county's parcel record for the property shows its tax district.

For the 2025 tax year, the City of Beaufort levies 61.3 mills plus 12.6 for debt, and a mill is one dollar of tax for every $1,000 of assessed value. Outside the city, a fire district's levy takes the city's place: Burton Fire is 69.1 mills plus 3.9 for debt, and Lady's Island/St. Helena Fire is 40.0 plus 2.7. Beaufort County's own levy is 59.5 mills, and the school district levies 126.1 for operations and 36.3 for debt (SC Association of Counties, 2025 Property Tax Rates by County, February 2026 revision). A home you live in as your legal residence is assessed at 4% rather than 6%, and it is exempt from the school operating mills once the county grants that rate. You apply through the Beaufort County Assessor, and for a tax year the application is due by January 15 of the following year (Beaufort County Assessor).

Two more lines show up on a city bill. Since January 2023 the City's solid waste fee has been on the property tax bill rather than on the water bill, with Capital Waste Services as the hauler (City of Beaufort). The county's stormwater table lists the City of Beaufort at $95 per unit of paved area plus a $5 administrative fee, with unincorporated parcels at $71. That table is dated 2020, so the current bill is the better source (Beaufort County stormwater fees). A purchase also resets the home's taxable value in South Carolina, and the new figure shows up on your second tax bill after you buy. The Bluffton page walks through what that does to an escrow account.

The river, flood insurance and wind coverage

The City of Beaufort holds Class 6 in FEMA's Community Rating System, which is a 20% discount on a flood policy. Unincorporated Beaufort County, which takes in Habersham, Burton and most of Lady's Island, holds Class 5, a 25% discount (FEMA CRS Eligible Communities, April 2026). Mossy Oaks, the neighborhood around Beaufort Middle, is in an 800-acre floodplain, and some homes there had flooded four or five times in four years. The City's roughly $6 million drainage project cleaned out a canal, enlarged pipes and installed tidal flap gates, and the City reports all of them in place and working (SC Rural Infrastructure Authority). Downtown, construction on the Charles and Craven Street stormwater improvements began the week of October 20, 2025, with $11.9 million from the SC Office of Resilience (SC Office of Resilience).

The City's Flood Vulnerability Assessment, done with SC Sea Grant and the College of Charleston, found tidal flooding becoming more frequent, with most major events since 2015. It also modeled that 3 feet of sea-level rise would put nearly a third of The Point under water (City of Beaufort Flood Vulnerability Assessment). That is scenario modeling for planning, and it says nothing about a specific parcel. For a home in FEMA's high-risk flood zone, the lender requires flood insurance, and the premium is part of your monthly payment.

Wind coverage is the other policy to ask about here, and the river itself is the line. South Carolina has a wind pool, the South Carolina Wind and Hail Underwriting Association, set up by state insurance law so homes along the coast can get wind and hail coverage. The same law draws the Association's coastal area, and in Beaufort County that area is everything east of the west bank of the Intracoastal Waterway (SC Code § 38-75-310). The Beaufort River is that waterway here. Downtown is on its west bank and Lady's Island on the east side, so a Lady's Island address falls inside the coastal area and a downtown address may be outside it. All the law does is draw that line along the waterway. It does not say, by itself, where the wind coverage on one specific home will come from or how it will be priced. Your insurance agent is the one to ask about that. Before you make an offer, I would ask the agent two things: which side of the line the address is on, and where the wind coverage for that home would be written. Either way, the wind premium is part of your monthly payment.

Short-term rentals, Historic District renovations and heirs' property

The City adopted a new short-term rental ordinance on April 28, 2026, after about ten months of meetings. It caps short-term rentals at 4% of the parcels the ordinance allows in each neighborhood, and at 3% inside the National Historic Landmark District. The Point, which had an outright ban since 2018, is now inside that 3% cap. The ordinance allows one rental per parcel and requires 300 feet of spacing between rentals, with existing operators grandfathered. Each rental also needs a conditional use permit, which is the City's permission to run a rental on that one parcel, with conditions attached. A safety inspection, a business license, and state and local accommodations taxes go with it, and the City enforces the ordinance with a three-strike policy (The Island News; WSAV). If rental income is part of your plan, please read the City's current ordinance and ask the City whether a permit on that specific parcel transfers to you, because I could not confirm that it does. Please tell me at the start too, because how you plan to use the home changes how the loan is written.

Inside the Historic District, the City runs two review tracks for a Certificate of Appropriateness, staff review for smaller work and major review by the Historic District Review Board (City of Beaufort). If you plan to renovate, the City can tell you how long to allow for that review.

In the Northwest Quadrant, the part of the Historic District around Bladen Street, some homes are on heirs' property, and that matters if you are looking there. Heirs' property is land passed down through a family without the estate going through probate court, so the deed can still be in a relative's name from generations back. The family living there cannot show clean proof that they own it, which is what a marketable title is, and until that is settled they may not be able to sell the home to you. In July 2026 the City's Northwest Quadrant Task Force recommended that council support Lowcountry Legal Volunteers seeking up to $150,000 for quiet-title cases for about ten of those families. A quiet-title case is the court action that settles who owns a piece of land. An attorney told the task force a simple one takes about a year and a hard one takes five years or more (Citizen Portal summary of the task force meeting). The title search your closing attorney runs is what catches a title like that, and the South Carolina page explains why every closing here goes through an attorney.

Impact fees, water and sewer on a new home in Beaufort

Beaufort County has collected impact fees for roads, parks and libraries since June 5, 2023, and the county's own example for a 2,300-square-foot home comes to $4,607. Inside the city, a fire impact fee of $305.43 has applied since January 1, 2021 (City of Beaufort FAQ). The $9,535 school impact fee you may have read about covers southern Beaufort County, south of the Broad River, so Beaufort, Port Royal, Lady's Island and Burton are outside it (WSAV; Beaufort County). The builder pays these, and they reach you through the price of the home.

Water and sewer come from the Beaufort-Jasper Water & Sewer Authority. Residential rates effective July 1, 2026 are a $13.58 water base charge plus $5.32 per 1,000 gallons, and a $19.81 sewer base charge plus $8.50 per 1,000 gallons, with the sewer charge capped at $104.81 a month (BJWSA Rates). A new home also pays BJWSA a one-time sewer capacity fee, which covers the new home's share of the treatment plant and pipes it will use. It is $5,362 if the builder pays it before construction starts, or $6,221 if it is paid when the water meter is installed near the end of the build (BJWSA). That is the last step of a three-phase increase approved in 2024. If you are buying new construction, please ask the builder which of these are already in the price and which you pay at closing. There is no local transfer fee here; the 0.25% fee on Hilton Head Island belongs to that Town alone.

Your Beaufort mortgage payment and the loan limits in Beaufort County

The county, city or fire district mills, the solid waste and stormwater fees, the homeowners policy, the flood policy where the zone requires one and the wind policy are all part of the monthly payment a lender qualifies you on. So do the dues in Habersham, Islands of Beaufort, Pleasant Point, Coosaw Point or Dataw. I have not printed any of those, because I have not confirmed them against each association's own resale documents. So please ask early for the complete resale package, the set of documents that lists the dues, any special assessments and the association's rules, and the dues from the association's own documents go into your payment. Every address on this page is in Beaufort County, so the loan limits in the box below are the same whether you buy on Bay Street, on Lady's Island or in Burton. The conforming limit is the largest loan Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will buy in this county, and the FHA limit is the most FHA will insure here.

Once you're ready, getting pre-approved in South Carolina explains what I'll ask you for and what you get back. You'll see pricing for your scenario, choose a rate option, which you can change later, and the application opens from there. If you already own in Beaufort and want to look at your rate or your equity, refinancing in South Carolina is the place to start.

Nothing here is a loan approval, a denial or a commitment to lend, and it is not tax advice. The value Beaufort County uses for a specific property, and whether it gets the 4% rate, are set by the county assessor. The City answers the city-limits question for a parcel, so please confirm the assessed value, the 4% rate and the city limits before you rely on any of them.

Common questions

How do you pronounce Beaufort, South Carolina?

BEW-fert. The Beaufort in North Carolina is pronounced BOH-fert. The city was chartered on January 17, 1711 and named for Henry Somerset, the 2nd Duke of Beaufort, one of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina.

Is Habersham inside the City of Beaufort?

No. Habersham carries a Beaufort mailing address, but Beaufort County approved it as a planned unit development, a neighborhood planned and approved as one package under its own master plan. It is on the county's zoning map, so it is in unincorporated Beaufort County. A home there pays no city millage, carries a fire district levy instead, and gets the county's Class 5 flood insurance discount rather than the City's Class 6.

Is Lady's Island part of the City of Beaufort?

Mostly no. Lady's Island is largely unincorporated, and the in-city part is mainly the commercial strip on Sea Island Parkway near the Woods Bridge, where the City annexed parcels to smooth its boundary. The City's City Limits map and the county's parcel record show which side of the line a specific property is on, and that decides whether the city's mills or the Lady's Island/St. Helena fire district's mills are on the bill.

Can I rent out a home in Beaufort as a short-term rental?

Inside the city, under the ordinance adopted April 28, 2026, short-term rentals are capped at 4% of the parcels the ordinance allows in each neighborhood and 3% inside the National Historic Landmark District. The Point is now inside that 3% cap. Each rental needs a conditional use permit from the City for that one parcel, a safety inspection and a business license, one rental is allowed per parcel, and rentals need 300 feet of spacing. Please read the City's current ordinance and ask the City about the specific parcel, because I could not confirm whether a permit transfers to a new owner.

Is the Waterfront Park promenade open?

No. The 1,200-foot promenade at Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park has been closed since the summer of 2025 after an engineering analysis found many of its pilings eroded. In 2026 the city's Waterfront Advisory Committee chose a plan to rebuild the platform, replace the pilings and raise the structure about 8 feet, and the City estimates three to five years of work. The rest of the park stays open, and the Shrimp Festival, the Gullah Festival and the Water Festival still run there.

Does the school impact fee apply to a new home in Beaufort?

No. The county's school impact fee covers southern Beaufort County, south of the Broad River, so Beaufort, Port Royal, Lady's Island and Burton are outside it. A new home in the city does carry the county's road, parks and library impact fees and the City's fire impact fee, which the builder pays and which reach you through the price of the home.