Fishing Frenzy

Once you have found out about evaluating your boat, there are lots of things that you can do during the sale to make sure that you get the most value out of the transaction.

Also, by managing to get a good amount of interested buyers thanks to good boat marketing, you will be able to avoid having to sell the boat via a dealer, therefore avoiding to waste money on hefty commission payments on your vessel.

To start with effective boat marketing, you should make sure that the boat is well presented, and also that you are able to reach out to the maximum number of potential buyers. Putting a listing on the internet is a great way to achieve both.

Also, remember that a picture speaks as thousand words. Take lots of good quality digital pictures of the boat, avoiding to represent it on ads and classifieds with a couple of blurry images from your last fishing trip or sailing weekend. Take purposeful images, and modify them slightly with an image editing software to make sure that your boat stands in the best possible light.

After having researched possible advertisement alternatives, choose on the one, or several, that you are going to use. There are lots of valuable free listings available on the internet, but you may want to supplement these with a more visible paid listing. Boat sales take a while, so you should have your listing up for at least two months.

You can also recycle a slightly altered Internet ad for local yacht clubs, marinas, bars and other places where fellow boaters congregate and where you may find potential buyers. Finding an interested person in one of these places will allow you to sell locally, taking the hassle of travel away from the buyer and making the deal more likely.

Remember to include all of those characteristics that will help set your vessel apart from the others when you write the ad text. Justify your sales price underlining the value for money to attract more potential buyers. Don't forget to make sure that the contact details are accurate. Providing both a phone number and an email address is a good idea.

Once a serious potential buyer has been found, you will need to be ready to answer lots of questions, so be ready with all the specifications, history, extra pictures, and other info that you need. It's often good to go through a question and answer process before actually visiting the boat, as this will save you time during the visit.

After the buyer's vetting process, if he or she is really interested you will have to fix the price together. You should always be ready to concede a bit on this point, so it's important to take this onto consideration when fixing the initial boat asking price.

The secret to sales negotiation is to be well prepared, anticipate what potential buyers are likely to say and work out in advance how you're going to react, keeping in the back of your mind what price you'll be prepared to accept. If there is anything about your boat that makes it unique and/or particularly attractive to the buyer, make sure to point that out.