Total Newbie buying a share - Perils and Pitfalls?!

[Expo]

Hello everyone ... We are new around here and new to boating, but are seriously considering buying a share of a boat to get us into the boating world without the outlay of buying a whole boat of our own. We have looked at a couple already and have two more viewings lined up shortly. I would very much appreciate any words of wisdom or warning you more experienced folk may have to offer on any aspect of our plans. I have thick skin, so if your advice is "Don't!!!" I can take that ...!!

 

I am returning to boating after a long break so have some (albeit rusty) experience and we are planning to take a two day course with a highly experienced instructor before heading off on our own. (This is already provisionally booked, pending the share purchase decision)..... So, anything we should or should not be doing, what to look for on the boat, issues with share arrangements or management, in fact anything you'd like to offer will be much appreciated.

 

Thank you everyone in advance for your thoughts ....

[steven wilkinson]

Hello. I have a share in a boat too! Our share is up for sale as the share has served its purpose as a stepping stone to whole-boat ownership! For what its worth, here are my thoughts! (In no particular order)

• Pet friendly? (If you need it to be, or need it not to be!) (Extra cleaning costs due to pet on board too?)
• Special share? To have (pay for) the opportunity to secure school holidays, ahead of standard share owners choices.
• Managed or self-managed boat?
• How many share owners? Do some owners have multiple shares? How long have others held shares?
• Costs - make sure you know every payment you will be expected to make towards the boat, and when it will be made. (We pay a monthly fee, and then our 1/12th of the 'winter maintenance' costs when the boat comes out of the water every January.) Are any big spends already planned? (Painting?)
• Location - where is it based, how long has it been there, is a move to a new location planned?
• Week choices - How is it done?
• Handover day - when is it? Times to pick up boat, and times of return.
• Inventory of boat - what will you need to bring to the boat when you cruise?

Some syndicates are one happy family, others are a financial arrangement, and then there are combinations of both! It is up to you how much you want to join in!

 

I think that covers most of the important things.

Edited July 26, 2016 by steven wilkinson

[churchward]

We used to have a share boat for a few years and it was a great way to get into boat ownership and have more than the odd week firing per year.

 

We certainly found it cheaper than hiring.

 

I guess the issues can be getting a week or fortnight booked when you want to and even with a management company looking after most things it means you need to agree stuff with the other people who share such as where the boat is kept and optional maintenance items.

 

Share ownership means you can't leave stuff on the boat when you are not there.

 

maintenance can be quite a high cost as the boat is used so much all year round but still cheaper than hiring and when you want to move on your share is an asset so you can sell it to someone else. We sold our share for not much less than we bought it so worked out well.

[dogless]

We had a share for five years. There were only positives from our experience. Learnt a great deal about boats and the system.

 

My only comment would be, buy a share if you want to go boating. Don't think of it as an investment. That way you'll not be overly disappointed at sale time. (We bought our share for roughly 4.5k and sold it 5 years later for 3k)

 

Rog

[David Mack]

Some share boats operate almost as hire boats, with individual share owners dealing only with the management organisation, and rarely having contact with their co-owners. At the other end of the scale you get a group of friends who buy a boat together, sometimes go boating together, meet regularly to conduct boat business and socialise, and do much of the boat maintenance collectively.

 

Most schemes are somewhere between these two extremes, but it is worth asking to contact some of the share owners before you buy, to explore their attitudes to some the issues. For example:

• Are the fellow owners people who would just spend money getting a boatyard to sort out problems, or are they DIYers?
• Does every handover take place at the base at the allotted date/time, or can you do a remote handover? This means the boatyard won't clean the boat, refill the fuel, empty the toilet tank, but it allows you to explore waters further from the home base.
• Do you all have the same attitudes to cleanliness and tidiness?

Get these right and sharing can be enjoyable, but if you find yourself at odds with your fellow owners, the boat could become something of a chore.

[pearley]

We thoroughly enjoyed the 6 years we had a share. We were intending to buy a secondhand share but after reading through some of the boat diaries they had on board the ongoing toilet problems put us off so we bought a share in a new one instead.

[Expo]

Thank you for al the replies so far. We are looking at a "second hand" share, but the boat we are most interested in (not seen it yet, though!) seems to have had a good deal of maintenance done, repainted etc and generally looks very tidy, from the pictures we've seen. Reality may be quite different, of course. I'll keep you posted!!

 

Pearly ... good idea to read the on-board log. we'll do that when we visit.

Steven Wilkinson ... yes, it needs to be pet friendly and I'm prepared to do the extra cleaning needed to ensure it's spotless when we leave, having done the same for rented cottages etc in the past. It's one of those things when you have a dog ... (drop me a note about your share if you like ... we're definitely shopping ...!)

David Mack ... I don't know about the people as yet. I hope they'll be a nice bunch, but as my granny was wont to say ..." ... there's nowt as queer as folk ....!!"

 

We don't need a special share as would actually prefer to avoid school holidays, being retired and childless, so that's not an issue.

 

So ... onward and upwards. I hope to be able to update soon with news of purchase.

 

Thanks again everyone.

[steven wilkinson]

It wasn't a sales pitch - honest!

[adam1uk]

We had a share for a few years. The only danger is that you end up needing to buy a whole boat...

[steven wilkinson]

We had a share for a few years. The only danger is that you end up needing to buy a whole boat...

 

 

Yep! That's us!

[junior]

 

 

Yep! That's us!

That's great to hear. Will you be keeping the new boat up this way still?

[steven wilkinson]

That's great to hear. Will you be keeping the new boat up this way still?

 

Somewhere that way, but not sure where just yet!

[ditchcrawler]

read the contract very carefully and make sure you are 100% happy with it and fully understand every point. Who can use the boat, Ie, share owners letting their kids take it out. Can you do remote handovers, very useful for getting further away, we have handed over on the K&A, Gloucester dock, Ware, it lets you cover much more ground if the other owners are up for it.

[Dave_P]

I'd always assumed the share boats always did remote handovers. Otherwise you're just gonna end up repeating the same routes. Shows what I know, eh?

[cuthound]

We had shares I boats for 22 years before buying our own.

 

As others have said, check the contract regarding remote handovers, changing weeks etc.

 

We always found the ex-Ownerships contract to work well. We have friends in an ABC boat manged by BCBM and they are selling that because of inflexibility and the biggest problem with shared ownership the other owners!

 

Sometimes you get a great lot and sometimes you don't.

[Top cat]

We spent 10 happy years in a private syndicate, we got lucky in that it was( and probably still is) a great group of people, some of whom we still keep in touch with. We learned a lot which has been invaluable in choosing and operating our own boat.

The best advice I got prior to joining was " find out the ethos of the syndicate and only join if you can live with it". So check the contract but also find out how things are done in reality.

I know others who lost money in the Challenger and Ownership scandals so checking on the financial security would be a good idea. Personally I would feel more secure in a private syndicate rather than a managed one given the history of managed schemes.

 

Top Cat

 

Top Cat

[Jrtm]

I think there fine till someone wants out. As when they / you want out youll want to asap and this maybe when all the daggers come out.

I think there fine till someone wants out. As when they / you want out youll want to asap and this maybe when all the daggers come out.

[RevCedd]

After several years of owning a couple of weeks with the Canal Boat Club we have just bought into a private share syndicate. It is too early to say much about it (as we haven't used the boat yet) but the syndicate seem really nice and many have owned shares in the boat since she was launched, and some have double shares. Two weeks on the Oxford Canal coming up soon.

 

Having said that the Canal Boat Club were OK too - choice of 8 bases etc and no worries about the boat in between trips. However the quality of the boats was not always the best, and it always seemed to be the loos that went wrong...

 

We found our share through boatshare.co.uk.

[Grassman]

We bought a 12th share in a 9 year old boat for £3,500 and sold it for £3,250 4 years later. Costs were around £1100 pa which included a fee to employ a management company, plus we had to pay for fuel, a pump out, and valet each time we used it. So it was much cheaper than hiring.

 

Because all costs are shared amongst 12 you will usually find that they've been well maintained and are reliable. A newer boat would have lower maintenance costs but a higher share price obviously, as well as it depreciating faster.

 

Having the extra cost of a Management company will cost around £350pa. If the syndicate has folk who are willing to do the administration then you don't need one, but they can also be useful as arbitrators should there be any dispute amongst the group of owners. None of us wanted the hassle so were happy to pay the management company to do all of this.

 

As for differing standards of cleanliness, all owners on our boat paid the £30 for a valet which avoided the problem.

 

Quite a few syndicates meet once a year to discuss and vote on what they were going to spend on the boat in terms of improvements and maintenance, and where they are going to have the boat located, and in between correspondence was by email or phone.

 

We loved the experience and have no regrets but you have to accept you're not always going to get your own way of course.

[Machpoint005]

We had a share for a few years. The only danger is that you end up needing to buy a whole boat...

 

Our experience exactly. A great deal depends on the attitudes of your "co-owners". Hand-overs can be fraught, and don't forget that a booking for a week is actually only six days. We also found that having to book holidays in advance - sometimes as much as 18 months in advance - was impractical.

 

At least with your own boat you won't find (many) items of equipment that move about of their own volition.

Perhaps I'm obsessive, but why would anyone not put knives, forks, spoons in that order in the three slots? (That's just an example)/

[davem399]

I'd always assumed the share boats always did remote handovers. Otherwise you're just gonna end up repeating the same routes. Shows what I know, eh?

Our shared boat rarely does remote handovers, but we do change base every couple of years to get to a different part of the system.

[Jerra]

yes, it needs to be pet friendly and I'm prepared to do the extra cleaning needed to ensure it's spotless when we leave, having done the same for rented cottages etc in the past. It's one of those things when you have a dog ...

I know of some syndicates where there is a rule which says if you have a pet you have to pay for a professional valeting.

[PeterG]

We had a share in an Ownerships boat and found it worked very well with their contract. We did not invest in any of the dubious schemes as we thought they must be that and because we did not have any spare money to invest. That said we did get out when some of the group started to treat the boat just like a hire boat rather than something they were looking after as their own.

 

It does depend on the others in the group though as you only in this case got a 12th say on what happened, but overall was a great thing to do.

 

We now have our own boat and love the freedom that gives instead of the prebooked weeks but it does come at an increased cost and effort to look after the boat rather than relying on a management company which is good when you are starting.

[cuthound]

I think there fine till someone wants out. As when they / you want out youll want to asap and this maybe when all the daggers come out.I think there fine till someone wants out. As when they / you want out youll want to asap and this maybe when all the daggers come out.

We had shares in two boats, one from 1992 to 2001 and the other from 2002 until 2013. Before that we hired for 19 years and after that we bought our own boat because I had retired and it was possible to justify the cost.

 

In that time many people left and joined the schemes ano there was not a single instance of any daggers coming out.

 

In both cases our share sold within a short time.

 

The one thing we did notice with the first bost, was as as the share price became lower as the boat got older, the newer co-owners treated the boat more like a hire bost. Less "skin in the game" I suppose. However this did not happen with the second boat, so I guess it's luck of the draw regarding fellow co-owners.

 

It proved to be an excellent "apprenticeship" for boat owning and enabled us to cover the vast majority of the inland waterways system.

[Billw]

It does greatly depend on the members of a group, and a good group can be spoiled by one "rotten apple".

I found that having a share generally worked, but when it came to selling there was much unpleasantness and discord. Beware of becoming "trapped" with ongoing costs continuing when you would like to be out.