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Would you pay £50,000 for an overplated boat?


Neil2

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I've done a fair amount of canal boating now, I've bought and sold a few boats and though I don't have on at the moment, I do keep an eye on the market.

 

I was drawn to a 55' boat recently, enough to make a phone call to the broker and ask a few questions, one of which was to clarify what work had been carried out on the hull.  It has been fully overplated to the waterline, ie the baseplate and hull sides.  Maybe not unusual for a 30 year old boat, but when I suggested to the broker he was asking rather a high price for an overplated boat entering its 4th decade he replied that yes, it is a little optimistic but in the current market it's not far out...

 

Now unlike others on this forum I don't have anything against buying an overplated boat especially if it's possible to establish exactly why it was done and who did the work, but £50k..?   

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9 minutes ago, Neil2 said:

I've done a fair amount of canal boating now, I've bought and sold a few boats and though I don't have on at the moment, I do keep an eye on the market.

 

I was drawn to a 55' boat recently, enough to make a phone call to the broker and ask a few questions, one of which was to clarify what work had been carried out on the hull.  It has been fully overplated to the waterline, ie the baseplate and hull sides.  Maybe not unusual for a 30 year old boat, but when I suggested to the broker he was asking rather a high price for an overplated boat entering its 4th decade he replied that yes, it is a little optimistic but in the current market it's not far out...

 

Now unlike others on this forum I don't have anything against buying an overplated boat especially if it's possible to establish exactly why it was done and who did the work, but £50k..?   

It would be a definite NO from me!

Perhaps the vendor is a fan of the Everly Brothers,    

Dream Dream Dream.  😜

 

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Prices have gone so crazy that I'm not surprised at all.

 

I saw a boat on facebook yesterday.  A 37' 1968 Springer which has been tarted up a bit inside going for £28,500.  The advert even has the cheek to mention a survey done 3 years ago and strongly imply that a new survey won't be necessary!  One person expressed surprise at the price and there was a full-scale pile-on of people attacking him and saying it was worth every penny.  The truth is, they're right.  It's will probably be sold by the end of the week.

 

My boat is 20 years old and is probably now worth what it cost when new, if things continue in the same way, in another 10 years it will be worth even more.

 

If I was selling right now, I'd be tempted to put it for a ridiculously high price because you just don't know what people might pay.

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Dora, your post is thought-provoking. I've just renewed our boat insurance on 'Trojan'. Now, for years I quoted the same value for the boat (three-quarters of her price when new) and a couple of years ago I cut the stated value by £5,000, thinking, well, she was built in 2006 and has probably depreciated further by now. I wonder if, to cover us in case a disaster occurs, I should consider altering the declared value to a higher figure.

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2 minutes ago, Athy said:

Dora, your post is thought-provoking. I've just renewed our boat insurance on 'Trojan'. Now, for years I quoted the same value for the boat (three-quarters of her price when new) and a couple of years ago I cut the stated value by £5,000, thinking, well, she was built in 2006 and has probably depreciated further by now. I wonder if, to cover us in case a disaster occurs, I should consider altering the declared value to a higher figure.

Why 3/4 of the new price it should have been what it cost you as you bought it new.

I would guess you are woefully under insured.

 

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11 minutes ago, Athy said:

Dora, your post is thought-provoking. I've just renewed our boat insurance on 'Trojan'. Now, for years I quoted the same value for the boat (three-quarters of her price when new) and a couple of years ago I cut the stated value by £5,000, thinking, well, she was built in 2006 and has probably depreciated further by now. I wonder if, to cover us in case a disaster occurs, I should consider altering the declared value to a higher figure.

I started a thread earlier this year about insurance renewals as I tried to insure for a higher value but my insurer wouldn't let me unless I had a full survey.  I rang another insurer and they were quite happy with the revised value.  So after being a loyal customer of Collidge and Partners, they've now lost me.

 

 

Edited by doratheexplorer
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3 minutes ago, Loddon said:

Why 3/4 of the new price it should have been what it cost you as you bought it new.

.

 

Because boats, like cars, depreciate as soon as they stop being brand new, and in normal times they continue to depreciate gently until they're 20 years or so old, by which time their resale value has pretty much reached rock bottom. Not so?  

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1 minute ago, doratheexplorer said:

I started a thread earlier this year about insurance renewals as I tried to insure for a higher value but my insurer wouldn't let me unless I had a full survey.  I rang another insurer and they were quite happy with the revised value.  So after being a loyal customer of Collidge and Partners, they've now lost me.

Funny you should say that, we also left Collidge's a little while ago, though it was only because Craftinsure appeared to offer comparable cover for less money.

   I assume that if I tried to revise our boat's value upwards, Craftinsure would revise our annual premium upwards to match.

In addition, it could be hard to establish the boat's current value by the usual means of looking what similar boats are selling for. That would perhaps be straightforward if it was a 57 foot Colecraft with a Beta 43, because there are quite a few of those about. But ours is a 45 foot Mel Davis with a Gardner 2LW and is , if not unique, very unusual.

   Anyway, for the nonce she's insured for £55,000 which seems realistic to me, but if a 37-foot early Springer (it would be a bit later than 1968 I think) are "worth" half that sum, I may have to revise my view and take appropriate action.

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24 minutes ago, Athy said:

Because boats, like cars, depreciate as soon as they stop being brand new, and in normal times they continue to depreciate gently until they're 20 years or so old, by which time their resale value has pretty much reached rock bottom. Not so?  

No they don't,  at least none of mine ever have. All the boats I have bought over the last 30+ years I have sold for more than I paid for them. Admittedly none of them were new but a couple were under ten years old when I bought them.

With a new boat you have to think what it would cost for you to replace your boat if it was destroyed the day after you bought it, that is what it should be insured for and that's a minimum.

 

Would you be happy to part with it for £55k?

Edited by Loddon
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25 minutes ago, Athy said:

In addition, it could be hard to establish the boat's current value by the usual means of looking what similar boats are selling for. That would perhaps be straightforward if it was a 57 foot Colecraft with a Beta 43, because there are quite a few of those about. But ours is a 45 foot Mel Davis with a Gardner 2LW and is , if not unique, very unusual.

A broker would have no trouble giving it a quick lookover, before suggesting an asking price. And comparing with others is essentially what they do.

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9 minutes ago, David Mack said:

A broker would have no trouble giving it a quick lookover, before suggesting an asking price. And comparing with others is essentially what they do.

Yes indeed; though I can't imagine a broker's reaction if I rang him and said "Would you mind coming down to Cropredy and valuing our boat? We don't intend to sell it, by the way". There would probably be a hefty fee involved.

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19 minutes ago, Athy said:

Yes indeed; though I can't imagine a broker's reaction if I rang him and said "Would you mind coming down to Cropredy and valuing our boat? We don't intend to sell it, by the way". There would probably be a hefty fee involved.

We are with Collidge too and they started off saying we needed a full survey if we wanted to increase the amount our boat was insured for. I spoke to a boat surveyor and he said that we would be better getting a broker to give a current market value (that is what the insurance company needed apparently). I ran this past Collidge and they agreed. As kelpie had been on ABNbs books when we bought her (direct from the seller) we spoke to them and one of their guys visited when we were in dry dock last week and did a very thorough walk through , including the hull which would not normally be included in a market value valuation.  Yes, it did cost us but apart from the insurance we wanted to know what the boat was worth for  other reasons. 

 

haggis

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Pricing is difficult. Overplated at 30 years? Hardly surprising so that's OK by me, but to get that sort of money I would expect to see it kept in very good condition, a sort of rolling refit if you like so that it is largely less than 10 years old or it was a very special boat when built and on its way to being a classic. However if its just a decent boat that has had some overplating and is much the same as it was when built that prices just daft. 

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There are plenty of brokers around whose detailed knowledge of boats is about the same as an estate agents' detailed technical knowledge of houses i.e. sketchy, once you scratch the surface.

 

There are also people about who believe every penny spent on their boat (or car, or caravan, or whatever) increases the value of it by the amount spent. So having shelled out perhaps £20k blobbing on a second baseplate over the old one and overplating a foot up the sides all round, the seller might have just added this expense to what he paid for the boat. And the broker might possibly agree as they may well be making a big deal of how the hull is now once again 'as new'. (Lol.) 

Edited by MtB
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It depends much on who did the overplating, and how well. If it was done by a well known and highly experienced professional boatyard, and was properly surveyed both before and after the overplating (with the paperwork to support that) then the value of a boat should not be reduced just because the work has been done. Our own 67ft boat, which was 30 years old and had been properly overplated as well as being meticulously maintained throughout its life, sold for that price within just a few hours of being advertised and the buyer's surveyor said it was well worth it.

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1 hour ago, Tracy D'arth said:

If you have a 10 6 4 mm hull and you stick 6mm base plate on it, is it still a 10 6 4 hull? If you clad the sides with 4mm will it fail to be insurable when it gets a 0.25mm pit?

 

It probably becomes a 6 6 4 mm hull. It isn't realistically possible to get two steel plates to be totally flush - they will not be absolutely flat as supplied and both will have been distorted by welding - so an ultrasonic test will likely only pick up the thickness of the outer plate and that is what the surveyor will report. 

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3 minutes ago, Tracy D'arth said:

As I knew, so I can see no point in overplating unless its something worthy.

 

Well the obvious reason is that if you own the boat that needs replating it's cheaper than selling at a very much reduced price and buying another boat. It may be the only sensibly affordable option.

 

It's just a repair technique. Canal boats live in three feet of water, what's the worst that can happen? It's not like it's a polar ice-breaker (which on reflection probably do have doubling plates 😏).

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