How to Sell a Yacht

Every owner sells eventually. The family outgrows her, the itch for another ten metres becomes unignorable, or the accountant finally wins an argument. There is no shame in it — the sale is as much a part of ownership as the launch — but there is a right way to do it, and a slow, expensive wrong way that begins with the words “she’s worth at least…”

Know the market you are actually selling into

The post-pandemic frenzy, when anything that floated sold over asking, is done. What replaced it is a busy but unsentimental market: 363 yachts over 30 metres changed hands in 2025 — up 15 per cent on the year before, north of €7 billion in total — yet more boats were listed than sold, and asking prices drifted back roughly seven per cent to pre-2023 levels. Brokers recorded over a billion dollars in cumulative price reductions last year. Translation: buyers have choice, they know it, and the boats that sell quickly are the ones priced by someone who has read the room.

The United States remains the busiest brokerage arena, with the core of the action in the 100–130ft range, and buyers gravitating hard toward 2020–2023 builds — modern systems, no yard queue, no new-build premium. If that describes your boat, you hold cards. If she is fifteen years old with original interiors, you hold fewer.

Price her like you mean to sell her

Overpricing is not ambition; it is a slow leak. A yacht that sits on the market gathers a reputation the way her hull gathers growth, and every month of marina fees, crew salaries and insurance comes out of your eventual proceeds. The disciplined move is to price against recent comparable sales — not asking prices, which in this market are a fiction with a seven-figure gap to reality — and to leave sensible negotiating room rather than a chasm.

The best boats, correctly priced, still trade fast. Everything else becomes inventory.

The broker question

You can, in theory, sell privately. In practice, at superyacht level, you appoint a central agent. Expect a MYBA-style central agency agreement: typically twelve months’ exclusivity, and a commission of 10 per cent — often on a sliding scale for larger deals, along the lines of 10 per cent on the first $10 million, 5 per cent on the next, 2.5 per cent above that. The figure is negotiable, and it covers any introducing broker on the buyer’s side. Read the tail clause: if the agreement lapses and the boat later sells to a buyer the agent introduced, commission is still due. It is standard, and it is enforced.

What you are buying for that fee is reach — the databases, the shows, the quiet calls to the four people actually shopping in your bracket — plus someone to absorb the time-wasters, the tyre-kickers and the fantasists who want a sea trial for the photographs.

Sell the survey before the buyer commissions it

Every serious offer will be conditional on survey and sea trial, and the surveyor works for the other side. So walk the boat as he will: service records complete and current, class and flag paperwork in order, oil analyses on file, the tender running, the deficiencies you have been living with either fixed or priced into your number. A crisp, well-documented yacht surveys clean, and a clean survey is the difference between closing at the agreed figure and reopening the negotiation from underneath.

Presentation still matters — decks bright, interior depersonalised, the crew drilled for viewings — but it is table stakes, not strategy. Nobody pays a premium for teak oil. They pay for the absence of doubt.

Closing without drama

The mechanics are settled ritual: a memorandum of agreement, a 10 per cent deposit into escrow, survey and trial, then completion — with the real work in the details. Where the closing happens and where the boat is lying can carry VAT and sales-tax consequences worth genuine money; ownership structures, flag and outstanding crew or yard liens all need to be clean before funds move. This is the moment for a maritime lawyer, not a general practitioner with a boat-shaped enthusiasm.

Then sign, hand over the keys, and resist the urge to look back from the quay. The cure for selling a yacht, as every broker knows, is the next one — which is, of course, exactly what they are counting on.