BY JAMES EVENSON
If I told you the straight truth about how the used-boat market works, you’d think me a conspiracy theorist. As much as I love the idea of Katy Perry being a lizard, I’m afraid this one is entirely true. After you read this, I invite you to go ahead and ask Claude. Or better, ask your broker. Off the record. After the second beer.
The truth is, I’m about to piss off some people. I deleted this article twice, because there’s a group in this space you’re not supposed to cross, and everybody on the working waterfront knows it even if nobody says it into a microphone. I’ve spent twenty years and hundreds of consultations helping people buy boats, over 90,000 miles delivering them (I’m writing this from the deck of a 56-foot Bluewater sailboat, en route from Fort Lauderdale to Block Island Sound), and for the last few years I’ve spent the majority of my time making content to help new sailors not screw up as badly as I did. I’ve watched good people get skinned on bad boats, and honest boats rot unsold, and I kept blaming sloppy brokers and lazy sellers. I was wrong. The system isn’t sloppy; the deck is stacked. Keeping you ignorant is the business model.
One Group Owns Everything
Go boat shopping tonight and count your tabs. YachtWorld. Boat Trader. boats.com. They may look like different sites, but they’re the same one: Boats Group. They also own the big listing sites in Spain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and the UK. They own YachtCloser (the software your broker uses to paper your deal). They even own a boat-loan brokerage. The showroom, the classifieds, the closing paperwork, and a hand on the financing: one company. And that company has been passed between private-equity funds three times in ten years. The latest deal, announced in December, reportedly values it around TWO BILLION DOLLARS. Don’t want to take my word for how locked-up this market is? Ask the traffic trackers: Similarweb lists YachtWorld’s two closest competitors as… Boat Trader and boats.com. The market leader’s biggest rivals are itself. Nobody pays two billion for boat classifieds. They pay two billion for a toll booth with no detour.
