It wasn’t news to us when we went to full-throttle on our boat search that the biggest obstacle to finding our next home was going to be the listing brokers. We had been nosing around the market for the past year or so, and found ourselves constantly amazed at the lack of attention and responsiveness we found from most yacht brokers.
We had thought, though, that perhaps this was something we had brought on ourselves… some scent we had given off that brokers could smell and which somehow told them, “These people still haven’t sold their last boat yet… they’re not going to buy from you right now!” Or maybe we were too pushy, wanting to look at chain plates and engine mounts and keel bolts and asking uncomfortable questions about the provenance of streaks beneath hatches and portlights. Maybe they had plenty of easier customers lined up and we were just a waste of time to deal with at the time.
Those theories have mostly evaporated for us now. We’re still pushy and ask uncomfortable questions, but a lot of these boats obviously don’t have other buyers lining up for them because they’ve been on the market for months and months, and now we’ve got a pile of cash sitting around waiting to shower on some receptive buyer. But we still can’t get people to show us the boats!
Yesterday was a beautiful day to show a sailboat: sunny, breezy, not freezing (finally), a fine day for prospective buyers to be imagining themselves out behind the wheel of a gorgeous new sailboat. Mandy and I planned to spend the whole day hopping around looking at boats all along the northern Puget Sound.
In the end, we looked at one boat. Three different brokers, representing another five boats between them, just never got back to us. I had called earlier in the week to set up appointments. I spoke personally to two brokers, one of which I set the appointment with on the boat we actually did look at (although he got the time wrong by an hour), the other of who agreed to send me location and access information via e-mail but never did. The others just never called.
I would write this off to a bad streak of luck if it weren’t so consistent with our broker experiences. We have met exactly two brokers in the past year who have actually followed up with us, put any effort into answering our questions, or shown any sort of interest in getting the boats they are showing into presentable condition. The rest have been varying degrees of disinterested.
Something we consistently ask for after viewing any boat and leaving our contact information is for the broker to let us know if anything new pops up on their radar in the size/price/feature range we are looking for. But no one has ever bothered; finding out about new listings, even from brokers we have spoken with at length, is like pulling teeth. Perhaps there is some marketing technique that involves keeping your products secret that we are unaware of; if so, local yacht brokers are masters of the approach.
This can go so far as physically removing vessels to be viewed from their berths. We managed to get hold of one broker earlier in the week to take a look at one of our candidate boats. He told me where it was, and asked that I call back the next day to confirm. I did, and he asked me to call back again the day of the viewing to confirm. I did, and he seemed surprised. He told us again where the boat was but that he didn’t yet know how to get into it, but that we should meet him there and he’d figure it out.
Ten minutes later, he called back. “Yeah, it’s not at that marina anymore,” he said.
So we drove across town to meet him at the new marina it had been moved to, and then walked up and down the docks trying to find it. We did, eventually, by squinting hard enough to make out the vessel name through the thick patina of algae and grime that was covering it. It looked like it had only recently been raised from the sea floor. But we’d driven a long way and a little cleaning doesn’t bother us if the bones are solid, so we shrugged and started to climb aboard.
“Hello?” we heard a faint voice from inside. “Is someone there?”
The owner, apparently, had rented the boat out and neglected to inform the broker there was a liveaboard, and neglected to inform the liveaboard that his home was for sale. Nonetheless, he was extremely good-natured about the intrusion and helpfully showed us around.
Afterward, the broker told us, “I’m surprised you bothered to go aboard after seeing the outside!” Like most brokers, he blamed the owner. Another broker later told us he didn’t understand why owners wouldn’t spend a few hundred bucks cleaning a boat up so it would sell. There is certainly a good point there, but on the other hand, we find ourselves asking why a broker who stands to make ten percent of the sale wouldn’t do the same. It seems like they would have a compelling financial interest in doing so; if their stake in an individual vessel isn’t as large as that of the buyer, the percentage of their total income the sale represents is surely larger.
As far as we can tell, brokers exist primarily to enter typos into Yachtworld listings, avoid taking phone calls, write down appointments incorrectly, and go to lunch. Frankly, it seems like a pretty cushy job, and Mandy and I are putting some consideration into opening our own brokerage now. We even think we have figured out how you can still make money running a business like that: the customers are all nuts.
This makes more sense the more we think about it. At a recent gathering, a fellow sailor advanced the theory that all of us boaters are simply bat-shit crazy. “It’s not like we haven’t heard all the warnings,” he said. “We’ve all got stacks of books this thick with horror stories from everyone else who has ever owned a boat about everything that can go wrong. But six months later, after shelling our our life savings for one, we’ll be sitting there in a bar ourselves saying, ‘No shit, there I was….'” And he was right; we’re going to go spend a completely unreasonable amount of money on some leaky scow that will take that much again to simply own and operate, causing us considerable indigestion and sleepless nights along the way.
I think you can apply that same basic theory to just about anyone or anything nautical. So that explains why we’re going to go throw our money away on a new boat despite the brokers’ best efforts to prevent it, and it explains why we keep hearing that marina operators are supremely worried that they can’t keep their slips filled yet we just got a rate notice increase from them, and it explains why brokers themselves who stand to make ten or twenty grand on a boat sale won’t return the calls of folks with money burning a hole in their pocket or lift a finger to clean up an otherwise serviceable vessel.
I guess it all just works to keep life interesting.