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Everything you need to know before buying a canal boat


Alan de Enfield

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Everything you need to know before buying a canal boat (telegraph.co.uk)

 

Extract :

 

When Abigail Richardson was looking to buy a new boat home last month, she kept being pipped to the post. “The market is crazy right now,” she said, speaking with a pseudonym. “Boats were getting snapped up very quickly.”

Eventually, she struck lucky. “A marina mentioned it had another that had just come in, which wasn’t on their website yet, so I was first to view and put in an offer immediately.” She is now the proud owner of a 57ft narrowboat on which she lives on the Kennet & Avon canal.

 

The market has been buoyant for a while, said James Millsop of Rugby Boats, a brokerage which usually has about a dozen boats for sale. “For the past five years or so, there’s been an increase in demand, with people’s interest piqued by TV programmes showing life on the canals.”

Brexit has been another factor creating demand. “When it got more difficult to live abroad, people opted to buy a boat and use it as a holiday home in this country.” Then Covid and lockdown hit and “it’s all gone bonkers”, said Mr Millsop. “Boats are coming in for sale one day and going out the next. We sold four in a week, recently,” he added. “People are phoning up to put deposits on boats they’ve not even come to view.”

 

Prices have shot up about 10pc in the last year, according to Rebecca Long of Whilton Marina, which has been selling second-hand boats on the Grand Union Canal in Northamptonshire for 50 years. Back then it was fibreglass cruisers that adventurous types bought for weekend forays on the semi-derelict canal network. These days, with sky-high rents and house prices, “an increasing number of younger people are buying second-hand boats to take to London to live on,” said Ms Long. While mooring is pricey, those who roam the waterways without one can live in and around the capital for about £1,000 a year, plus fuel, after the upfront cost of the boat.

 

Boat builders are struggling to keep up with demand. Ortomarine, which specialises in electric and hybrid boats, is taking orders for build slots in 2024.

Production line companies are similarly stretched. One – Bickerstaffe Boat Company – builds a standard 57ft model aimed at first-time boaters. The company is unable to keep up with demand. Bickerstaffe’s Kev Kenny said: “The big problem is the shortage of steel and other products. Our raw materials costs have increased 70pc in the last four months.”

A new Bickerstaffe narrowboat currently costs £145,000, but a price rise might not deter many customers. “The first question people used to ask was ‘How much?’ but now it’s ‘How soon?’,” said Mr Kenny. Ten years ago, the received wisdom was that boats always depreciate but that is no longer the case, at least in the short term. One of their narrowboats recently sold on the second-hand market for £10,000 more than its new price.

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I spotted this earlier but didnt bother posting as 

1. It was behind a paywall..and

2. The journo is another lazy reporter who has missed by several years the headline news.

The most embarrasing part of this is that he is actually a boater on the canals!!

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Quote

...from Liverpool company Collingwood Boat Builders...
 

...transforming it into a thing of beauty...

So it can be done, providing you have a partner who's a builder and sixty grand to throw at the conversion. Electric drive, too.

 

Quote

Brian, currently moored on a canal outside Bristol, is now being sold privately by the couple for £189,000

He's not the messiah. He's just a very pricey little boat.

  • Haha 1
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