Friday, July 31, 2015

Selling a boat- part 1

We are selling our 28 foot Bayliner. Last year, we posted the boat on Craig's list. I never realized how tedious selling something can be. You would think that you post the listing, people who are interested respond, and then you're done. Nope, here's how it goes for us...

1- List the boat, hope for the best
2- Within a few hours, someone writes that they really like the boat and will give us $200 over list price just to hold the boat for them. Then they state several times that they would like to pay using paypal. We text back and forth. They don't ask any relevant questions about the boat, just that they really want it. This happened twice and in both cases, someone was buying the boat for an elderly parent. One person said they were in the military and couldn't come to see the boat themselves. The other person had very bad English so we figured they were probably foreign (or never passed English class). In both cases, the potential buyers said that they trusted us when we said the boat was in excellent condition. Once I sent a link for paypal scams, their texts stopped.
3- Brokers will contact us offering to sell the boat. We had one company that, for a fee, will list the boat and continue advertising until it sold. This sounded very good since they list it in several places. We never pursued that. Pop Yachts- they continue to list our boat for sale even after I wrote to them not to. We had someone offer to sell it on ebay. I will have to check into that option- why have someone else do what we can do ourselves.  Here's the thing with the brokers- unless you own your boat outright or owe very little on it, you are limited. For us, we would end up owing the broker money for selling our boat.
3- We have this person who actually came to see the boat. He brought his family to see it. He said that he had been watching the boat for a year. He offered about $8K below list price. At that time, we were going through a broker so we couldn't afford to do that.

Since we are not in a hurry to sell the boat, we are continuing to use it and just waiting to see what happens. I have signs on the boat and it is parked in a visible spot. Its a very interesting process.


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