How do you sell your large sailboat without a broker?

[jayarmstrong]

A friend of mine has a large 56 foot aluminum hulled sailboat that was used for arctic sailing. I am helping him sell it. The only way i have found so far is to use a broker and put it on yachtworld.com. I encouraged him to put it on this site as well. What other ways are there to sell this boat? Should we use a broker?

[boatman61]

Originally Posted by jayarmstrong

A friend of mine has a large 56 foot aluminum hulled sailboat that was used for arctic sailing. I am helping him sell it. The only way i have found so far is to use a broker and put it on yachtworld.com. I encouraged him to put it on this site as well. What other ways are there to sell this boat? Should we use a broker?

Apollo Duck.com, Inautica.com.. a boat like this will have international appeal if it's any good..
Leave the broker for now

[Calif.Ted]

There are other forums similar to this like sailboatowners.com, sailnet.com and sailing anarchy, owners listing site like sailboatlistings.com. I'd think the market for such a vessel is limited and would benefit from the widest possible exposure which is probably a broker and yachtworld.

[grantmc]

How about adding the link to the sale listing.
Would love to see.
Forget the broker, the boat is too specialised.
Where is it?

[Chotu]

Originally Posted by jayarmstrong

A friend of mine has a large 56 foot aluminum hulled sailboat that was used for arctic sailing. I am helping him sell it. The only way i have found so far is to use a broker and put it on yachtworld.com. I encouraged him to put it on this site as well. What other ways are there to sell this boat? Should we use a broker?

Start with the first sale section of this forum. After that, everything else has already been mentioned above.

[Snore]

Please email me the details.

I have been approached to captain an around the world trip that will include high latitude legs. This boat May be a perfect fit.

Email is on my profile or contact me through my website

[stormalong]

List it on the local sailing publications like Latitude 38, 48 North, etc. There are many free boating/sailing publications that depend on advertising. The listings are not expensive and often include color photographs.

[pragmatist]

We sold our Rival 41 using links from the kind of sites referred to above - but directing them to a web site we set up ourselves. This allowed us to provide a lot more detail and history than is usually available in listings. We changed boat (tempus fugit and all that) and so sold and then bought. When looking for boats we found that many sites, including expensive brokers, had far too little information and far too few pictures.

With a boat this specialised you may well attract people from all over (we had prospective buyers from all parts of Europe as well as the UK) and they will want to know LOTS about the boat and its systems. When buying we certainly moved on if an ad had little information/few pitcures. After all if the vendor can't be bothered to tell you all about his/her favourite boat then he/she isn't really trying IMHO.

Having your own web site is cheap and not hard to do (we took ideas from other sites such as Boatshed - thumbnails leading to larger pictures) and worked on making it easy to navigate It is, however, quite a lot of hard work !

The other thing Boatshed do which works for us is to show the faults as well as the good bits. If you see that the lockers are dirty or the hatches are crazed you'll be less horrified when you turn up to view.
That's especialy true if you give reasons - unable to visit boat because of lock down or whatever. And if you think something looks really dodgy/raises questions you can ask before trekking long distance. Since our Rival had been somewhat neglected for health reasons, we had a lot of work done on her before putting her up for sale so we were able to add a list of Recent Work - as you'll see from the home page.

We were lucky enough to get rival41.co.uk (let the domain name lapse after selling so if you want to see what we did you'll need to click on Rival 41 for sale - UK which made Google listings easier but if you look around for keywords used on similar boats you may well find a good name for your web site. The sooner you get that up and running (even with some brief explanatory text "Blue Water Cruiser 56 feet blah blah been here and there done it carefully maintained blah blah. More details shortly and TODAY'S DATE !!!!" the sooner you'll get featured on Google searches. There is a lot of stuff visible on Google which turns out to have been sold years ago !

Good luck - hope to see your ad when its up (nosy of course ! And if I'm your grandmother teaching you to suck eggs then apologies - just telling you what worked for us !

Penny

[larsfforsberg]

Put a link here. I want to see it. I've got money burning a hole in my pocket, getting ready to fly to Tahiti in 14 days to buy a boat. let's see it!

[Mithril Bham]

Not only sold my 44 on Craigslist in a couple of days but had people lining up. Took 2 days. Price was right.

[longjonsilver]

How do you handle the money and title transfer ends of the deal without a broker?

[captlloyd]

Did anyone mention EBay ?

[Jack C]

Originally Posted by pragmatist

We sold our Rival 41 using links from the kind of sites referred to above - but directing them to a web site we set up ourselves. This allowed us to provide a lot more detail and history than is usually available in listings. We changed boat (tempus fugit and all that) and so sold and then bought. When looking for boats we found that many sites, including expensive brokers, had far too little information and far too few pictures.

With a boat this specialised you may well attract people from all over (we had prospective buyers from all parts of Europe as well as the UK) and they will want to know LOTS about the boat and its systems. When buying we certainly moved on if an ad had little information/few pitcures. After all if the vendor can't be bothered to tell you all about his/her favourite boat then he/she isn't really trying IMHO.

Having your own web site is cheap and not hard to do (we took ideas from other sites such as Boatshed - thumbnails leading to larger pictures) and worked on making it easy to navigate It is, however, quite a lot of hard work !

The other thing Boatshed do which works for us is to show the faults as well as the good bits. If you see that the lockers are dirty or the hatches are crazed you'll be less horrified when you turn up to view.
That's especialy true if you give reasons - unable to visit boat because of lock down or whatever. And if you think something looks really dodgy/raises questions you can ask before trekking long distance. Since our Rival had been somewhat neglected for health reasons, we had a lot of work done on her before putting her up for sale so we were able to add a list of Recent Work - as you'll see from the home page.

We were lucky enough to get rival41.co.uk (let the domain name lapse after selling so if you want to see what we did you'll need to click on Rival 41 for sale - UK which made Google listings easier but if you look around for keywords used on similar boats you may well find a good name for your web site. The sooner you get that up and running (even with some brief explanatory text "Blue Water Cruiser 56 feet blah blah been here and there done it carefully maintained blah blah. More details shortly and TODAY'S DATE !!!!" the sooner you'll get featured on Google searches. There is a lot of stuff visible on Google which turns out to have been sold years ago !

Good luck - hope to see your ad when its up (nosy of course ! And if I'm your grandmother teaching you to suck eggs then apologies - just telling you what worked for us !

Penny

Hi Penny,

Great marketing concept and execution. Can you tell me what web site builder you used? Or did you just code it in HTML?

[Dockhead]

The "Boats For Sale" section of the classified forum on Cruisers Forum works great. Lots of boats sold that way.

[Mike Banks]

Gumtree.