Selling Affordable Boats

My husband works for a yacht brokerage in Punta Gorda. He gets at least one call or visit every week from someone who wants to sell a boat that’s simply too low-cost for the brokerage to list it. The brokerage, like most yacht brokerages, charges a commission based on a percentage of the boat’s sale price, but does have a minimum commission of $2,000. For someone with a $5,000 or $10,000 boat to sell, that’s just too high a fee to list their boat with a brokerage. My husband is just one salesman at one brokerage in a small Florida city — out of many thousands of boat salesmen at many hundreds of yacht brokerages throughout Florida. There must be hundreds, even thousands, of boat owners who need to sell their boat, but their boat isn’t worth enough to list with a used boat dealer.

The thing is, my husband hates the interactions he has with these boat owners. Don’t misunderstand — he likes the boat owners themselves. But he hates having to tell them that the brokerage can’t list their boat, and then sending them away without being able to suggest any sort of reasonable solution for them.

These boat owners often have no good alternative for marketing their boat. They can list it with one of the big national online boat sale sites — but by the time they’ve paid for 6 months of listing fees, extra charges for photos, extra charges to highlight their listings, and extra charges for this, that, and the other, they’re likely to spend just as much as if they had listed their boat with a yacht brokerage.

Or they can take out a classified ad in their local newspaper, or post fliers on the local community center bulletin board, but that kind of advertising is somewhat limited in terms of the number of people that are likely to see the ad.

So what are these boat owners to do? Where can they go to sell their boat, without having to pay out advertising fees or commissions that are just too high relative to the value of the boat?

To meet the needs of this underserved market, our flagship web site, Tropical Boating, has recently launched Affordable Boats Online. This new site is a classified ad web site designed specifically to offer listings of affordable boats for sale in Florida.

Initially, Affordable Boats Online is offering absolutely free listings — including photographs — to boat owners wishing to offer their boat for sale. Eventually, the site will begin charging for ads, but will always keep ad fees low enough to be a reasonable cost for even very inexpensive boats.

But for now, all ads are completely free of charge to boat owners with an affordable boat for sale in Florida. All boats under $25,000 can be listed — anything from kayaks, canoes and dinghies to jet skis and ski boats. The only requirement is that the boat be located in Florida, and that it listed for sale at no more than $25,000.

If you have an affordable boat in Florida to sell, hop on over to Affordable Boats Online and add your boat. It’s free — what have you got to lose?