How to Buy a Superyacht: A Broker's Guide, Decoded

The fantasy version of buying a superyacht involves a handshake on a dock in Antibes. The real version involves an industry-standard contract, an escrow account and a deadline measured in hours that you ignore at your peril. None of it is complicated — but it is a market with its own rules, and the buyers who fare best walk in already knowing them.

Who pays the broker (not you)

Commission on a brokerage sale is typically 10 per cent of the price, paid by the seller and split between the listing broker and the broker acting for the buyer. Read that again: your representation costs you nothing at the point of sale, which makes arriving unrepresented an act of charity towards the other side. Spend your effort choosing well instead. Ask what they have closed in the past two years, at what sizes, and how they behaved when a deal went sideways. The good ones also hold the keys to boats that never appear on the listings — a meaningful share of large-yacht sales happen off-market, between brokers who trust each other.

The shortlist is built from honesty

A broker is only as good as the brief. How many weeks a year will you genuinely be aboard? Which coasts? How many guests, and do any of them arrive by helicopter? Owners who answer these questions honestly get a shortlist of five boats worth flying to see. Owners who answer aspirationally get a season of viewings and a yacht that suits an imaginary life.

The paperwork, decoded

Once you have a boat and a price, the deal will almost certainly be written on the MYBA Memorandum of Agreement, the contract the Mediterranean Yacht Brokers Association has made the industry default. Its rhythm is worth knowing before you sign:

• A deposit of 10 per cent of the purchase price goes into a stakeholder's escrow account, typically within four banking days of signing. It secures the boat and signals you are real.
• You are entitled to a condition survey, at your expense, and a sea trial, at the seller's.
• If the yacht disappoints on trial, you must reject her in writing within 24 hours of its completion. Miss the window and you are, contractually speaking, still buying her.

Survey like you mean it

The sea trial exists to reveal what listing photographs are designed to hide: vibration at cruising speed, generators under load, stabilisers doing actual work, the noise level in the owner's cabin with every system running. The survey goes deeper still, and here you should hire the most demanding surveyor money can find — the seller's discomfort is rather the point. Every finding is either a repair before closing or a number off the price. On a $20 million boat, a thorough survey routinely pays for itself a hundred times over.

Or don't buy at all — yet

There have always been two kinds of buyer: those who want a yacht that is theirs, and those who want the use of one. Be sure which you are before the deposit moves. If you will spend fewer than eight or ten weeks a year aboard, charter — and let someone else own the depreciation, the crew payroll and the yard bills. Ownership is for those who want the boat waiting where they left her, with a crew who know how they take their coffee. The elegant compromise is to charter the very boats on your shortlist for a season first. It is the cheapest survey you will ever commission.

Either way, the mechanics favour the well-advised. A good broker earns a fee you never pay. The least you can do is use one.