What 24 Years in This Business Has Taught Me About Buying and Selling Yachts
I have been brokering yachts out of Tampa Bay for 24 years. In that time I have watched the market boom, crash, flood with inventory, dry up, and do it all over again. I have sat through more surveys than I can count, been on both sides of deals that closed in nine days, and watched beautiful boats sit for over a year because somebody fell in love with a number.
So when people ask me whether they really need a broker, I do not give them the sales pitch. I tell them what I have actually seen.
What I Actually Do All Day
There is a persistent idea that a broker's job is to put a boat on a website and wait. If that were the job, I would have been out of business two decades ago.
The real work happens in the gaps. It is knowing that a listing three slips down just closed for 12% under ask and why. It is calling a surveyor I have used since 2009 because I need someone who will actually pull panels instead of walking the deck with a flashlight. It is telling a seller something he does not want to hear about his own boat.
For a buyer, I am the person keeping you from making an expensive mistake with a hull you have already emotionally moved aboard. For a seller, I am the person telling you the truth about your price while everyone else tells you what you want to hear.
Why Buyers Come Out Ahead
The best boats often move before they are ever public. A meaningful share of what I have sold over the years never made it to a listing site, or was only there for a matter of days. Brokerage networks are relationship businesses. I know which brokers in Fort Lauderdale, Naples, and Charleston have owners quietly thinking about selling next spring. That access is not a marketing line — it is the actual product.
Asking price and market value are two different numbers. I have watched buyers pay well over what a boat was worth because it was listed that way and nobody told them otherwise. Before I let a client write an offer, we look at what comparable vessels closed at, not what they were advertised at. Those two figures can be a long way apart.
Due diligence is where deals get expensive. Here is one I still think about. Years back I had a buyer, sharp guy, financially disciplined, ready to close on a sportfish that looked immaculate. Survey came back with moisture readings in the transom that the seller swore had been addressed years earlier. It had not. That find was the difference between a great buy and a six-figure repair bill on a boat he had already named.
I have never had a client regret a thorough survey. I have had several tell me the survey was the best money they ever spent.
Negotiation is not one number. Everyone fixates on price. In practice the deal is won or lost on deposit structure, survey allowance, what happens if the sea trial reveals something, coordinating financing, insurance, delivery terms, and how survey findings get resolved. I have closed deals at full ask that were better for my buyer than a lowball offer would have been, purely on terms. You truly are better off buying a boat in good shape vs. hoping you are going to take a neglected boat and make it great again at a lesser cost.
Why Sellers Come Out Ahead
Pricing is the whole game, and most sellers get it wrong in the first two weeks.
This is the single most expensive mistake I see, and I see it constantly. An owner has a number in his head — what he paid, what he owes, what his neighbor claims he got. He prices to that number. The boat sits.
I had a listing a few years ago where the owner insisted on going to market roughly 15% above where the comps said he should be. He was certain his boat was different. It sat for eleven months, took three price reductions, and eventually sold below what I had recommended on day one — because by then every serious buyer in the region had seen it languishing and assumed something was wrong with it.
Nothing was wrong with the boat. The price was wrong, and then the story was wrong.
Days on market is a signal buyers read. Once your boat has been sitting, you are no longer negotiating from strength, no matter how clean she is.
Presentation is not vanity, it is leverage. In a competitive segment, the best-presented boat wins and it is not close. Complete maintenance records. Fresh detailing. Professional photography in good light, not phone shots at the dock at 2 p.m. with a shadow across the sheer line. I have watched two nearly identical vessels hit the market the same month, and the one with organized records and real photography sold faster and higher every single time.
Not every inquiry is a buyer. A significant portion of the calls that come in on a well-priced yacht are curiosity, dreamers, or people gathering intel on their own boat's value. Qualifying those calls is unglamorous work, and it is a large part of what you are hiring me to absorb. Your Saturday should not be spent walking a stranger through your engine room who has no intention of buying anything.
What the Numbers Actually Say
Opinions are cheap in this business, including mine. So here is the data, and then here is what I think it means after 24 years of watching cycles like this one.
Across North America, the average combined days on market reached 209 days in 2025 — 37 days longer than 2024. Break that apart and the story gets more useful:
New boats: 279 days, up 50 days from the prior year.
Used boats: 139 days, up 16 days.
That leaves a 140-day gap between new and used.
(Figures from the Boats Group 2025 Market Index.)
Now here is the part most people get wrong when they see those numbers.
Longer time on market did not mean falling prices. Average sold values actually went up in 2025 — North America rose 4.90% to $169,997, and the global average climbed 1.89% to $215,798. Read that again if you are a seller staring at a boat that has been listed ninety days. Buyers took longer and negotiated harder, but they did not force a price collapse. That is the single best argument I can give you against panic-cutting your price in month three. A slow market and a falling market are not the same thing, and confusing the two has cost sellers more money than any other mistake I see.
And the trend turned late in the year. Full-year global sales finished 9% below 2024, which sounds grim in isolation. But the third quarter steadied, the fourth quarter came back to modest year-over-year growth, days on market began moderating as the year closed, and consumer search interest was actually up 1%. The honest word for 2025 is recalibration, not decline. Buyers did not disappear. They got patient and selective.
What that means if you are selling: price to today's comps on day one and plan for a longer runway than you would have in 2021. The buyer is out there, but he is comparing you to everything else on the water, and he is in no hurry. Your job is to be the obvious choice in your segment, not the cheapest.
What that means if you are buying: you have leverage on time and terms that you did not have three years ago. Use it. Take the extra week, do the deeper survey, negotiate the allowances. But do not mistake a patient market for a soft one the well-priced, well-presented boats in the strong segments still move, and hesitating on the right hull will cost you the boat.
The Florida Timing Question
One thing you will not get from a national listing site: our market has a rhythm.
Buyer activity here builds as northern owners start looking south in the fall, peaks around the winter and the boat show cycle, and thins through late summer. Hurricane season changes insurance conversations, survey scheduling, and sometimes a seller's urgency. A boat listed in October and a boat listed in July are two different sales, even if they are the same hull.
Between our St. Petersburg office and our Key West location, we see both the Gulf Coast market and the Keys market, and they do not always move together. Knowing which side of the state to position a vessel on can matter as much as the price.
The Part That Actually Matters
Buyers today have access to more information than any generation before them. That is a good thing. But information is not judgment. Knowing the asking price of every comparable yacht in Florida does not tell you which of those sellers is motivated, which one has already turned down an offer, or which hull has a known issue in that model year.
That gap between data and judgment is the entire value of doing this for 24 years.
If You Are Thinking About Buying or Selling
If you are getting ready to bring a boat to market, call me before you set a price. That single conversation is where most of the money is made or lost, and it costs you nothing.
If you are buying, tell me what you actually want to do with the boat — where you want to cruise, how often, with whom and let me tell you whether the vessel you are looking at is the right tool for it. Sometimes the honest answer is that it is not, and I would rather tell you that now than after the wire clears.
Either way, you will get a straight assessment of where the market stands and what it means for your situation.
Contact Tampa Yacht Sales today.
Shane Faunce, President, Tampa Yacht Sales, INC — St. Petersburg and Key West, Florida