Selling Season For Boats

Thanks,

MD

MD

I listed with Boat Crazy and got a lot more inquireys and a sale. You pay for one month and if you haven't sold it at the end of the month they will rerun for free until you sell.

Thanks Ron

Advertise it everywhere you can. Most FSBO ads are cheap, a lot are free, and most are only moderately effective so you need several of them working at once. Your eventual buyer will answer one of those ads- but since you don't know in advance *which* one, you need to take a shotgun approach.

If it's still sitting in your driveway after April 30, it's literally "mayday" on the price front. Since you have a short window of time and this is the month when *everybody* has their unwanted boat for sale, start with a realistic price. In a lot of cases you start really high and hope that the buyer will dicker you down- but when a short season market is topsy turvy with a lot more supply than demand buyers are less likely to hassle with trying to dicker down to "fair" price. Buyers with a lot of choices typicaly hope to find a boat with a fair asking price, *then* dicker down a bit, and feel like they got more boat than they paid for.

If the boat doesn't sell pretty quickly after you start to market it, it will either be price or condition that impedes your sale. If you have a lot of bait dangling by using a variety of ads but the phone doesn't ring or the email doesn't do whatever email does you can be pretty sure the problem is your price. People will be looking at the ad and concluding "Wouldn't matter how nice that boat is, it couldn't possibly be worth that!" (That's also why it's important to use several sources- there's a chance that one ad venue might be really weak and could be blamed for a lack of calls, but if you've got the boat advertised almost everywhere it's tougher to conclude that none of the magazines or websites are working.) If you get a few showings and folks are walking off with the standard, "Thanks, we'll think about it. We have a bunch of boats to see before we decide" that normally indicates that the issue is condition. Could be dirt, smell, damage, excess wear, or any number of things but if more than a couple of people drive out to your house knowing what you have for sale and knowing what you're asking for it and then make a clumsy exit, something about the boat will be turning them off.

After May 1, cut the price. Everybody else will be cutting theirs.

Like JimH said, after the end of June, first of July, you will probably need to cut the price down to a lot less than you hoped to get for it to find a buyer at all. This year the Fourth of July is a Wednesday, so no long weekend for most guys punching a time clock. The long weekends are going to be Memorial Day and Labor Day, and fewer people will be out in August trying to buy a boat for Labor Day weekend than will be out in the next 5-6 weeks trying to buy a boat for Memorial Day.

Another reason to price it to sell ASAP: if fuel prices continue to rise between now and Memorial Day and then stay high through midsummer (as they have done the last two years) it will really hammer the market value of a wide variety of boats. Every two-bits the price of gas goes up drives away another chunk of the market.