2nd Hand Boat Show

[truckcab79]

7 hours ago, StevieN said:

 

For the people with money who want to buy!

If you've something to sell no matter what it is, it is *you* that should be making the effort to bring the customers to you.

In principle of course but in reality if you can sell your boat without moving it or paying more than you need to to do so then why would you?  Perhaps if the market was more stagnant or your boat was very niche but the internet does the job well enough for most. It would be like have more work that you can possibly do and then spending money advertising your services to people you can’t service.
 

What are you looking for and at what budget out of interest. Have you looked and not found it or is that you’d just rather have a different and easier method of doing so and are just starting to look now?   

[Momac]

10 hours ago, StevieN said:

........ traipsing round the country.

Maybe an alternative would be to focus on brokerages where you intend to keep the boat.

To avoid  costs for transporting a boat a fairly local purchase does make sense. The cost of transport usually is the responsibility of the buyer. 

 

The availability and cost of a mooring may be a factor.  So perhaps you should also be looking into that .

 

 

[DandV]

8 hours ago, StevieN said:

If a sales event was set up in a few locations on the network - Coventry Basin/Llangollen Basin, those kinds of places, it would be fairly easy to cruise to those locations. I'm thinking of people that don't want to pay brokerage costs but rather sell direct. 

Costs of mooring and some cost to advertise. It's not against the will of man for someone with a bit of nous to organise.

You think you want perhaps a wide beam. So you would like to see some?

And you think the Llangollen and Coventry Basins would be good places for such viewing?

There is a problem. The width of access canal limits both to narrowboats only. 

 

The presence of the narrowboat only network in the middle dictates that wide beams for sale are much more dispersed.

Getting the right boat for your needs is far far more important then who the seller is, private, or a broker.

 

With brokerage rates of about 6-7% inc VAT , and presumably a private seller having an expectation of obtaining a higher yield selling that way , an even split of  the saved  brokerage fee only amounts to a discount of about 3%. 

You have to wonder if it is worth it, from both parties point of view. 

 

 

[blackrose]

8 hours ago, M_JG said:

 

Did you ask the charm school for a refund?

 

It was a very expensive Swiss finishing school.

[Francis Herne]

On 12/11/2023 at 14:54, StevieN said:

If a sales event was set up in a few locations on the network - Coventry Basin/Llangollen Basin, those kinds of places, it would be fairly easy to cruise to those locations. I'm thinking of people that don't want to pay brokerage costs but rather sell direct. 

Costs of mooring and some cost to advertise. It's not against the will of man for someone with a bit of nous to organise.

 

Second-hand boats rarely sell immediately (nor even quickly), and transport or movement costs are high, so cruising a long way for a one-or-two-day event where the boat is unlikely to sell at the asking price is impractical.

 

Trying to sell boats quickly at a short event would yield a lower price. The set of buyers changes constantly over time, and the boat market is small and varied. The person who'd most appreciate a boat probably isn't looking for one when it first comes on sale; waiting longer increases the odds of a buyer coming along who finds it 'perfect' rather than 'ok' and values it higher.

 

The boats thus need to be on display for a while. The constant, year-round stream of boats being sold means they'll overlap into a continuous pool.

 

CRT won't let boats sit around for display on high-demand basin moorings (and public basins simply aren't big enough for all the boats for sale at any one time) so the gathering has to be in a private marina whose owners want some money for that.

 

Someone needs to do the organizing, and it's a pretty thankless task so they'll want a cut too. Often, but not always, it's easiest if those are the same people who manage the moorings that are occupied.

 

Having allowed for reality, your regional event is now a marina-based brokerage. They're mostly distributed around the kind of popular hub locations you describe.

Private owners bring their own boats there for sale, because as you say gathering dozens of boats for sale in one place makes it easier and more attractive for buyers.

They pay for brokerage because there's no free supply of moorings or organizers, and because helping buyers by gathering boats together really is valuable to the seller so it's worth the relatively small fee to do so.

 

Your idea isn't exactly wrong - it's just that in our non-Utopian world the only way to realize it is the system that currently exists.

Edited November 14, 2023 by Francis Herne

[enigmatic]

Boat shows don't exist to make it convenient to buy boats, they exist to make money for the show organiser. Someone hoping to make £1m+ in new build orders will consider it worth booking to spend a few grand on space, ads etc. for next year's show at the place for boatbuilders to fill their unsold build slots.

 

Someone hoping to offload their only boat for £50kish isn't going to spend a few grand for the privilege of mooring in Coventry Basin one particular weekend next year, especially not when they can ask a local(ish) broker to do all the work for them for however long it takes to sell for under £3k, paid only if/when the boat is sold.

 

On 12/11/2023 at 15:22, cuthound said:

 

If the OP is finding the boat buying process inconvenient, then I doubt that he is sufficiently resilient to cope with the trials of boat ownership, unless he has very deep pockets.

I did have that thought when exchanging messages with someone who was really keen on my boat but reluctant to add the extra hour each way to see a second boat in a day or to do any more driving until the following weekend

 

I like boating a lot more than driving too, but just wait until that 2hr round trip is how long it takes to get halfway across town to empty a toilet cassette...if you're lucky